… Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross …

Ash Wednesday Part VI
T S Eliot

I began this project with an unsettling suspicion that there would be an element of looking into a mirror and finding no reflection or possibly worse, one revealing those dimly formed ‘things’ I might prefer to ignore - “Ouch!”

Art does not exist in isolation - a product of its time and understood through the context of the individual. Succeeding eras layer the understandings of their times over or alongside the original expression creating an even richer tapestry of associations.

Hans HOLBEIN the Younger
Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve (`The Ambassadors')
1533
Oil on oak, 207 x 209 cm
National Gallery, London

16C bling was a less scintillating indication of status and learning

A painting and by extension other types of art, usually has to have some pleasantly arresting aspect to attract attention for me and this seems quite a prevalent attitude, especially in our age of image saturation. There is a high probablility that I’ll pass by without question when that pleasant attraction is missing. Sometimes though a little prior knowledge is reason to sit and look for a while, for instance the Veronese ‘Feast in the House of Levi’ would have had far more appeal had I known what I was seeing at the time. There are other examples of Art that you almost don’t need to see because the ideas they embody seize hold of that attention.

It would be easy to dismiss ‘For the Love of God’ as another Momento Mori ‘… the prospect of death serves to emphasize the emptiness and fleetingness of earthly pleasures, luxuries, and achievements, and thus also as an invitation to focus one’s thoughts on the prospect of the afterlife’. Or to reflect on the very varied interpretations of Skull Symbolism.

Difficult to escape the Glamour of the ultimate expression of Bling with whatever opinions and attitudes bling arouses. My major difficulty trying to find some coherent understanding is in the many faceted directions this piece inspires in my thoughts, mimicing the gems and creating an equivalent of the ‘flocculent effect’ noted in Will Self’s article To Die For. This skull doesn’t grin - it laughs out loud at my attempts to grasp and articulate answers for questions that the finest brains have struggled and argued to comprehend for millenia - and with books to fill entire libraries about them. At which point, I have to join in and laugh out loud at my conceit and the ironies of Hubris but Chesterton makes a strong case for at least attempting some of the impossible. So, with a nod in both directions…

The following extract about Hymn from Dances with Sharks, includes some comments that may relate to facets of For the Love of God.
(contains strong language; emphasis added in bold).

22 March 2000

Damien Hirst
Hymn
1996
Photography and copyright unassigned - assumed to be © Damien Hirst

… Like the big guy [Hymn]. I financed that myself. But all the money I had off them [Charles Saatchi and Larry Gagosian; JF] was used to set myself up so that I never get under pressure again. So that I’ve not got someone knocking on the door when I’m experimenting on something that’s cost a lot of money, d’you know what I mean? To take a little toy like that of Connor’s and enlarge it to that sort of size, there’s a big possibility that it’s going to look shit.





GB Is it a toy? I assumed it was from a teaching-hospital.





DH I wouldn’t have done it with a teaching-hospital one. I did it with a toy. It’s called ‘The Young Scientist’. I might even get sued for it. I expect it. Because I copied it so directly [Hirst later paid an undisclosed sum to charities nominated by the toy's maker Humbrol to head off legal action for breach of copyright]. It’s fantastic. I just thought it was so brilliant, and it was so accurate, it was like a chemistry set, and I loved it that it was a toy. It was really similar to a medical thing, but much happier, friendlier, and more colourful and bright. And I just thought, ‘Wow! I wanna do that.’ I suppose it came from that idea of Koons doing those things [the witches' hat etc]. I just thought, ‘Twenty feet tall. Fantastic.’ But there’s no way you can get an idea of whether that’s going to work or not. So to go to Saatchi and say, ‘give us some money,’ and it turns out it’s shit and then he has to have it… So I managed to make that, blow it up, have it in my studio and sit with it until I was convinced it was good, and then decide whether I want to sell it or not. And Jay [Jopling] freaked out over it. He was: ‘Let’s get someone else to pay for it. Get someone else to pay for it!’ And it’s just shite doing that. It just doesn’t work out. You don’t get anyone else to pay for it. You pay for it yourself.





GB Why did you do it in bronze?





DH I just wanted it to be grand. It can go outside. It’s vandal-proof. Underneath it is this big fucking grand iconic fucking artwork. I mean, I love painted bronze. The paint on it’s like skin… It’s an outdoor sculpture. It’s like a car. It’ll decay. So eventually what you’ll be left with is this solid bronze man with bits of paint hanging off it. So in a way it’s like what happens to your body. I liked it for that reason. That’s why I went in for bronze.





GB It reminds me of something you said when you did the Building Sites film on the Worsley Building in Leeds for the BBC: ‘It’s almost as if the outside of the building, the exterior, is denying that it’s a part of the same processes of decay and destruction and corruption as the human bodies inside the building. The dead bodies come and go and the living bodies come and go, and the building stays the same. I get the feeling from the building that it’s more alive than me, which is terrifying.’





DH The guy at the foundry [where Hymn was cast], says, ‘What d’you want?’ So I gave him the toy and said, ‘I want it made this big, 20 feet, with a base this height.’ And he said, ‘What do you want it to look like at the end?’ And I said, ‘Plastic!’ He nearly had a heart attack. He said, ‘But it’s a bronze.’ I said, ‘I want it to look like plastic.’ ‘Well, why do you want it to be bronze?’ ‘Because I want it to be grand, and I want it to be bronze.’ And just when he finished making it, he phoned me up and he’s like, ‘C’mon, we can do some great patinas… We can do a really great red patina.’ I said, ‘What, bright red? Like plastic?’ He said, ‘Well, no. Not like plastic.’ ‘Well, can you make it took like plastic?’ And in the end, he thought it was great and he really liked it.





GB Most people will come away from it thinking it is plastic.





DH They will when it’s new. But they won’t in 10 years’ time. It’s like a car. It can be fixed up like a car or it can’t be. It’s tough. It’s car paint. But in 20 years’ time it’s going to look like a 20-year-old car… I felt very sad when it wasn’t there today when I went down. I missed it… When money comes in, I do things like that on the side. I’m beginning to more and more.





© Damien Hirst and Gordon Burn
Extracted from On The Way To Work by Damien Hirst and Gordon Burn, published by Faber & Faber on 22 October 2001 at £25

Firstly, qualify everything I say about these works as I’ve only ever seen photos. That isn’t a cop out - no photo can ever compare with the experience of seeing first hand that blue whale in the Natural History Museum.

My first reaction to seeing this - and most of his other works online - was ‘Uh?’ But add that bit of knowledge that it’s a bronze deliberately concealed and made to look like plastic whilst the image is literally spilling it’s guts, the flayed skin exposing the blood and bones, based on a toy rescaled to giant proportions and that the finish will deteriorate and age. No, I don’t think it’s terribly pretty but as an analogy of image, it’s spot on. Could there also be a comment about the ‘professional victim’ too? It definitely wouldn’t have the same impact if it had been on a mere human scale.

Hymn also goes beyond comments on the place of image in our present popular culture, implying comments of the society that venerates image and further implying about the place of art in that society, even including a comment about ‘itself’ as an example of art - almost like a fractal in reverse where the tiny part is a reflection and symptom of the whole.

I think it is fair to say that many people share a deep puzzlement or cycnicism about art that is too far removed from their personal ideas and expectations. I also think that a work of art that needs additional information to arouse sufficient interest to contemplate or gaze doesn’t quite succeed in it’s primary purpose, although that opinion is probably far too purist in practice. I don’t know what to think about Hirst’s works as objects of art - certainly artful. I began this project with a dismissive attitude towards him and his works - I find my attitude to have been unfounded prejudice. Several of his themes can be viewed as social commentary expressed with a masterful ambiguity of opinion that creates a tortuous enigma that can become quite compelling.

There are too many potential avenues of enquiry to include all that I’ve found from the several themes I’ve explored [1]. To return to the original questions …

Picasso’s Quotes regarding interpretations of Guernica remind me that whether conscious or deliberate implications were intended is an irrelevance verging on stupidity. If the extract above is typical, conscious or deliberate intentions seem unlikely - but none of the interviews I’ve read include this type of question. On the other hand, in The Last Supper Leonardo was emphatic in his intentions, concentrating ‘… on the different reactions of each of the Apostles, conveying their varied emotional responses through their facial expressions, poses and physical gestures. Surviving studies for the heads of some of the Apostles indicate that Leonardo studied the physiognomy and expression of each individual, working out every detail in drawings.’ Maybe the contrast is simply an indication of change in emphasis.

Hirst’s ‘grinning skull’ is primarily for me, a commentary about the place of image in Popular Culture, laughing at the successful appropriation of popular culture by Pop Art that turns it into an intellectual exercise to deliberately exclude the general public that created the popular culture it derives from - and incidentally, laughing at the inability of those who can not see this as either Art or to get the joke - as well as laughing at those who ‘buy into it’. Personally, I think Hirst is having a good laugh all round too - a bit like the tailors in The Emperor’s New Clothes but I have no strong evidence to support that opinion.

[1] Other themes including these:

White Cube - Damien Hirst


Saatchi Gallery: Highlights


Damien Hirst - The Last Supper


Damien Hirst - Prints


The 150th anniversary edition of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species


The art market according to Damien Hirst


Inside Damien Hirst’s factory