33 Artists in 3 Acts (32 page)
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Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.
Damien Hirst
Mother and Child (Divided)
Exhibition Copy 2007 (original 1993)
2007
J
uly 2009. My taxi speeds along country roads toward Damien Hirst’s Devonshire farmhouse, then turns into a long driveway, past the artist’s herd of grazing cows. The sight reminds me of
Mother and Child (Divided)
(1993), a sculpture comprising a cow and a calf, bisected lengthways, and displayed in four glass tanks filled with formaldehyde. This follow-up to his celebrated shark (a.k.a.
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living
, 1991) consolidated Hirst’s reputation for transforming dry conceptual art into witty, emotionally engaging sculpture. Hirst’s assistants continue to make these “still lives” (what the French call
natures mortes
), but the artist claims to have ceased production of his spot, spin, and butterfly paintings and closed the studios that make his labor-intensive pill and medicine cabinets. Hirst’s own days are now mostly spent alone in a painting studio here on the grounds of his house. In a move that has alarmed the art world, he is applying oil to canvas with his own hand. Hirst has always been cunning; now he is crafty in more ways than one.
As I get out of the taxi, a border collie whose coat is tinted pink from a tussle with wet paint comes to greet me. Jude Tyrrell, the director of Science, Hirst’s production company, emerges from the house. She worked with Michael Palin, the Monty Python comedian turned TV presenter, before she took a job with the artist twelve years ago; a press colleague
refers to her as Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guards the gates of hell. A moment later, Hirst appears. His gray shorts and brown hoodie are flecked with multicolored paint and his T-shirt declares, “You’ll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking.” I present him with a copy of the British edition of
Seven Days in the Art World
, which displays Maurizio Cattelan’s horse on the cover. “Hmmm . . . the Italian,” he says, examining the book with a slight sneer.
I understand Hirst collects Koons so, as we walk through the drizzle toward his painting studio, I tell him that I saw the American artist give a talk last week. Hirst affirms that the Serpentine Gallery’s Koons show is “fucking brilliant.” When Koons’s
Hanging Heart
(1994–2006) sold for $23.6 million in November 2007, he knocked Hirst off the top spot as the world’s most expensive living artist. “You can become competitive in your mind with someone like Jeff,” admits Hirst. “In your quiet moments, you wonder: what is he doing now? I’m doing this; I hope mine’s better. You get competitive but, when you really look at the art, all that goes out the window.”
We pass by a newly built indoor pool and gymnasium on which no expense seems to have been spared and, eventually, Hirst’s “shed,” as he calls it, comes into view. The building was originally a railway signal box to which the artist added a chimney and windows. The wooden façade is covered in drips of turquoise and splashes of black. Humble isn’t the right word. Shabby isn’t either. It’s a nostalgic fantasy of a poor painter’s shack.
Inside, the shed is dark and crowded, with exposed rafters and bare lightbulbs. A dozen canvases are stacked against one another; some face out, others stare at the wall. A pathway through the clutter leads us past a large mirror and disheveled bed to three paintings in progress depicting Medusa, which are in a standoff with a taxidermy bear, apparently turned to stone by their angry glares.
Hirst enjoys working in these cramped quarters. “I’m so used to having any space I want. What fucks me up is infinite possibilities.” He grabs a canvas that is about seven and a half feet high by five feet wide and skillfully slips it out the front door to lean it against the outside of the building. “I love the fact that I have to plot paths in space,” he says as
he moves two more canvases out so we can see the full triptych, which now covers the whole front of the small building. Titled
Amnesia
, the three panels in progress feature a skeletal red figure and red chair in an empty blue room. The middle panel depicts a shark’s jawbone containing an eyeball, which, like the eye of Fatima, appears to ward off evil.
“I’ve always had this romance with painting,” says Hirst. “It’s like a conceptual idea of a painter. The butterfly paintings were about an imaginary painter who was trying to make monochromes but the butterflies kept landing on the surface and fucking them up. I’ve always had a make-believe story going on behind the work.” These glossy paintings are covered in whole dead butterflies and are distinct from his “Kaleidoscope” paintings, which use only the wings. For the past few years, Hirst has been the largest importer of butterflies into the UK.
Hirst enters a separate prefabricated shed where he dries his work and brings out the three panels of another triptych called
The Crow,
placing them, one by one, on top of
Amnesia.
It’s a more minimal composition, with some real black feathers collaged on the surface. “I need to work on twelve paintings at a time, minimum. Otherwise I get frustrated because there’s not enough to do,” he says. The drizzle turns into a shower. Hirst ignores it; he likes the rain. “I find myself going more toward Rembrandt and away from Bacon. Painting more from life and, through practice, getting better.” As Hirst maneuvers the works back inside, he adds, “Painting is really hard. It’s about accepting your limitations but reaching for the moon.”
Three years ago, when Hirst picked up a brush for the first time since he was sixteen, he was “horrified” to discover that his skills as a painter were exactly where he had left them. “The first paintings were awful, but what I learned was that I had belief,” says Hirst. The first and third panels of this
Crow
triptych have white dots in the background. Although they are laid out by eye, they evoke his previous spot paintings, in which multicolored polka dots are arranged in meticulous grids. “The new spots are all about ‘the fuck-up,’ whereas, before, my paintings were about ‘the perfect,’” he explains. He has abandoned a mechanical aesthetic in favor of something he describes as “more personal.”
Inside the painting shed, Hirst takes a seat in a grubby, paint-splattered
1930s’ leather chair while I settle into a wicker rocker. There isn’t an assistant in sight and, frankly, between the stuffed birds, skulls, paintbrushes, and other props, there isn’t room for one either. “I always wanted to be the best drawer in the class,” he says. “I never was, which helped me. I had to find another way to get ahead. If I had been the best drawer, I would have been disappointed when I got out into the real world.” Hirst is known for his entrepreneurial skills—his flair for original ideas, marketing, and management—so many doubt that he is making these works himself. Hirst has someone stretch and prime the canvases but he insists that the paintings are otherwise solo performances. “I don’t think people will ever believe that I am painting them. It doesn’t matter how much paint I get on my hands.” He takes off his large black Prada frames and rubs his eyes. “It’s an awkward transition,” he confesses. “The idea of me painting troubled me in the beginning. I thought, is it erasing the past? Is it suggesting that I don’t agree with it?”
Hirst’s shift from a multi-factory operation to a mode that one might associate with an amateur gentleman painter is a career reversal that thwarts prevailing expectations of artistic development and challenges the art world’s belief in him. Only a few years ago, Hirst said, “Am I a sculptor who wants to be a painter or a cynical artist who thinks that painting is now reduced to nothing more than a logo?” When confronted with the statement now, he laughs, “I’m both. I’m still cynical. I’m still full of doubt. I’d say I’m a painter
and
a sculptor. I’m an artist
and
a comedian. I’m a hairdresser to the stars!” Hirst is expecting these new paintings to be “slagged off” by critics. “But you know what Warhol said, ‘If the critics don’t like something, just make more.’”
Hirst is nothing if not prolific. At the moment, he admits to making about a thousand spot paintings. He has a meticulous database from 2001 but there are some blank areas from the drunken 1990s, so he doesn’t have an exact total figure. “What you’re making dictates how many you make,” says Hirst, but then he semi-contradicts himself by implying that demand determines the numbers. “The art market is a lot bigger than anybody realizes,” he says, picking up a big brush loaded with gray paint and tossing it in the air like a baton. “If you’re interested in the art market side of things then it is to your advantage to make
more,” he says, mentioning the name of a figurative painter who makes only a dozen paintings a year. “The market can’t really get going because there is not enough of his work in circulation.”
Tyrrell signals that it’s time for lunch, so we trudge through the rain to Hirst’s farmhouse. A huge shorthaired cat called Stanley lounges on a long wooden kitchen table between two Warhols—a gray skull painting and a stunning, small red car crash from 1963 titled
Five Deaths
. “One great thing that came of buying art is that I understand my collectors. Collecting is fucking addictive,” says Hirst, steering me into an adjacent TV room. We sit on beanbags under a Bacon self-portrait that Hirst acquired at auction for $33 million. The room has acid yellow walls and blue carpeting. A large-screen television hangs on the wall between another Warhol, an orange
Little Electric Chair,
and an important Bacon from 1943-44. It’s thought to be the original right-hand panel of a triptych that hangs in Tate Britain, titled
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
. The installation traces Hirst’s inspirations from Warhol to Bacon in a room devoted to media.
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What is the difference between you and your myth? I ask.
“Your image is something you wear. It is not something that you are,” he says. “I guess I suddenly felt that the person I was wearing wasn’t really who I was. I’d undergone some big changes in myself, which hadn’t come through in the work. Maybe if I hadn’t changed so much, I could have carried on making that work forever.” Hirst scratches the back of his head, messing up his short-cropped gray hair. “That’s what made me push it to the auction. I was putting something to death as
well as celebrating it.” Back in September 2008, Hirst auctioned off over two hundred newly made artworks at Sotheby’s for £111 million ($198 million). It was a landmark event in the commoditization of art, which suggested that he had mastered the craft of being what Warhol called a “business artist.”
“It’s not really the money that I like, it’s the language of money,” explains Hirst. “People understand money. There are people who might have dismissed my work who can’t anymore.” The artist often talks about how money and fame can overwhelm art and honesty. “Integrity is about what you’re doing,” he explains. “Warhol said, ‘Look, I’m a starfucker.’ If you admit it and you are true to yourself, then it works.”
Are you a starfucker? I ask.
“I think we are all starfuckers to varying degrees. The whole celebrity thing comes out of a fear of death, which is what art has always been about. You meet famous people and it makes you feel closer to being immortal in some way.” Hirst crosses his arms and looks up at the
Electric Chair
. “Warhol made fame into an art form,” he continues. “When I first got involved in art, I was totally aware that you needed to get people listening to you before you could change their minds.”
Hirst is distracted by a message on his Blackberry. When he looks up, I say I’m fascinated by artists’ personas and his is particularly . . .
“Repugnant?” he interjects.
Ah, no, I was going to say “complex.” His word choice reminds me of a painting in which he depicts himself with an asinine grin, mugging for the camera with Jeff Koons and Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian steel oligarch. “It’s just a faithful copy of the photograph,” Hirst tells me. “I try not to choose photographs that flatter me so they are more believable.”
Some art professionals complain that Hirst so persistently breaks art-world etiquette that they wonder whether he has any respect for art. “I’ve always had trouble with authority. I don’t know what respect is,” he confesses. “A lot of what I’ve done has been based on what people said I couldn’t do.” When he was a student at Goldsmiths College, he organized an exhibition called “Freeze.” “Everybody said you can’t be an artist
and
a curator. After that, I could never follow any rules.” In the early 1990s, a dealer told him that you couldn’t sell works by young
artists for over £10,000. “I was like, ‘Fuck that.’ That was a hell of a lot of money at the time, but I was stubborn and ignored it. That’s what the shark came out of. To hell with the £10,000 limit!” Charles Saatchi paid £50,000 for Hirst’s first shark in formaldehyde.
Hirst’s chef delivers a plate of hot food, which I struggle not to spill on my beanbag; the artist tells her that he will eat later. “I’ve always thought that art and crime are very closely related,” he says, rubbing his hand on his stubbly chin. “Crime is incredibly creative. There’s the bank. If I buy that shed next to the bank, I can dig a tunnel, go underneath, break up the floor, take the money out, go back through the tunnel, and no one would know I was there. That is exactly what art is like!” Hirst seems to relish the role of symbolic criminal, an artistic position with more power than an
enfant terrible,
although he is most often described as a showman. “They’re all bullshit,” he responds, dismissing this list of identities. “At the end of the day, the only interesting people are those who say, ‘Fuck off, this is what I think.’ It’s a very indulgent thing, being an artist.”