"Hirst’s trademark repetitions soon become apparent. There’s a lot in this show that is round or round-ish: pots, dots, diamonds, spinning paintings, flies, pills, balls and tightly coiled cigarette butts – a seemingly endless variation on a theme of full stops that refuses to put a stop to anything, least of all itself. While illness is intimated in the rows of surgical implements and drugs that form endless patterns in cold, elegant cabinets, death – the ultimate full-stop – is undoubtedly the star. There’s a large vitrine that contains a life-cycle of maggots, flies and a bloody cow’s head that faintly infects the air with the smell of rotting flesh (A Thousand Years, 1990). Elsewhere is the famous dead shark (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991), its furious face as wizened as an ageing rock star’s; a couple of melancholy sheep (Away from the Flock, 1994, and Black Sheep, 2007); a cow and a calf both separated and split in two (Mother and Child Divided, 1993/2007); and a gallery of dying butterflies excreting their tiny gestural pupae on swathes of white canvas (In and Out of Love [White Paintings and Live Butterflies], 1991). Dead things are very dead here, despite Hirst’s attempt to raise them to the heights of symbol or metaphor, signifier or whatever. Bluntness is part of his point – he wants us to literally encounter mortality – but it doesn’t reveal an awful lot. We die? Living things have insides? For all his theatrics, Hirst remains a curiously literal artist: his instinct is, generally speaking, to take something and either cut it in two or suspend it in formaldehyde or put it on a shelf or repeat it endlessly, much of the time for no better reason I can think of than to worship at the altar of Mammon.…Taken together, Hirst’s work declares that life is sort of amazing, if a little repetitious, but death – although sort of amazing too – really sucks, but nature is as scary and as beautiful and as pointless and as doomed as we all are, but possibly – just possibly – God exists."

 

HIGGIE, J. (2012). ‘Damien Hirst’. Frieze. 148. Available from: http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/damien-hirst/. Date accessed: [28/04/14].

 

 

Hirst appears to the viewer to be attacking and scorning Christianity by purposefully making his artwork shocking and grotesque. However, his beliefs about the Christian God appear to be unclear. This is demonstrated in several interviews with Hirst and the underlying messages in his artwork that question Christian beliefs and the existence of God rather than denying them. In a similar way to the artwork of the Dutch Still Life artists, Hirst uses symbolic objects to make the viewer question their own beliefs in immortality and God.

Jesus and the Disciples and The Ascension of Jesus:

The heads of the cows in this installation immediately bring to mind the symbol of the skull in the works of the Dutch Still Life artists. The skull in these artworks is a memento mori, Latin for ‘remember that you will die’. The skull is symbolic of the transience and fragility of life, warning us of the vanity of earthly pleasures and the inescapability of death (Ravenal 2000:14).

The combination of the skulls in Jesus and the Disciples and the inclusion of a representation of Jesus’ resurrection create a similar affect to that of Hans Holbein the Younger’s. Hirst, like the two men in The Ambassadors, appears to be very aware of his mortality and is questioning whether salvation lies in Jesus Christ.

The theme of mortality runs through Hirst’s work from as early as 8 Pans (1987). The common theme of round objects appears in many of Hirst’s works: pots, flies, and diamonds, spinning paintings and dot paintings, where the circle could be seen to represent a full stop. However, the repetitive nature of these full stops in his work ‘refuses to put a stop to anything’ (Higgie 2012: 148). Is this reflective of Hirst’s underlying unease with his supposed claim to atheism?

Mortality is also reflected through Hirst’s use of medicinal objects. The fragility of human life is reflected in works that focus on illness such as Pharmacy and Sinner. Hirst explains that the cabinets used in many of his works ‘work like a box to protect things’ (a. Tate gallery, 2012). Hirst displays the longing that human beings have to continually prolong life in any way possible, most probably out of a fear of death. In using out of date medicines which become poisonous, Hirst appears to be representing that life cannot be prolonged forever, that there is an expiry date. Hirst may also be asking if science, such as medicines and surgery, can actually solve the problem of death.

The skulls and dead objects within Hirst’s work create more than just a visual reaction like that of the Dutch Still Life paintings, but a multi-sensory response (similar to the work of Anya Gallaccio). The artwork A Thousand Years (1990) is comprised of a large glass tank with a decapitated cows head surrounded by myriads of dead flies. This artwork creates an indistinct rotting smell in the gallery space that means ‘you have an immediate visceral response to it’ (b. Tate gallery 2012). This creates revulsion within the viewer and increases the skull’s effect by bringing to attention death and mortality. In a slightly different way Hirst’s In and Out of Love [White Paintings and Live Butterflies] (1991) created an even further multi-sensory experience of mortality. A room lined with blank canvases and tables holding flowers and sugar water enabled a multitude of butterflies to live, mate and die in the gallery space. This experience of the short life of an organism creates a sheer reminder of mortality through the engagement of the viewers who can walk through the space and be amongst the butterflies.

 

For the Love of God and For heaven’s sake:

Hirst’s sculpture For the love of God is a human skull which he has covered with £8 - £10 million worth of diamonds and is worth in the region of £100 million (O’Hagan 2006). For Heaven’s sake is a second diamond skull that Hirst created using a cast of a 40 to 42 week old infant, 7,105 natural pink diamonds and 1,023 white diamonds (Anon n.d.). Both For the love of God and For Heaven’s sake have titles based on phrases that Hirst’s mother used. ‘For the love of God’ was the phrase that his mother exclaimed when Hirst described his intentions for this artwork to her (b. Tate Gallery 2012). These are examples of how Hirst plays with British contemporary culture to challenge and disturb the watching public. With these pieces Hirst is linking together both our British cultural past of belief in Christianity and the contemporary culture of consumerism. Through using the vanitas symbolism of death shown through the image of a skull, Hirst draws a similar link to that of the Dutch Still Life artists to the need for Jesus who conquered death. Hirst is also using exceptionally expensive diamonds to make a point about the current state of consumerism in Britain. Diamonds, as a symbol of desire and extravagance, create a contrast to the skull that draws the viewers’ attention to the idea of life after death and British roots in Christianity. The phrase ‘diamonds are forever’, originating from the De Beers jewellery advertising campaign in 1999 (Bergenstock et al 2001:37), embodies Hirst’s intentions behind these works, showing the emptiness of physical gain.

 

 

 

RAVENAL, J. (2000).Vanitas: Meditations on Life and Death in Contemporary Art. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts: Virginia. 7, 14-32.

 

HIGGIE, J. (2012). ‘Damien Hirst’. Frieze. 148. Available from: http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/damien-hirst/. Date accessed: [20/04/14].

 

a. TATE GALLERY. (2012). ‘Damien Hirst walkthrough with Ann Gallagher and Damien Hirst’. Available from: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/damien-hirst. 2.10 minutes and 12.15 minutes. Date accessed: [16/04/14].

 

b. TATE GALLERY. (2012). ‘Damien Hirst: Art and Life’.  Available from: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/damien-hirst. 5:20 minutes. Date accessed: [16/04/14].

 

O’HAGAN, S. (2006). ‘Hirst’s diamond creation is art’s costliest work ever’. [article]. Available from: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/may/21/arts.artsnews. Date accessed: [15/04/14].

 

Anon. (n.d.). ‘For Heaven’s Sake, 2008’. [website]. Available from: http://www.damienhirst.com/for-heavenas-sake. Date accessed: [17/04/14].

 

BERGENSTOCK,D; MASKULKA, J. (2001). ‘The De Beers Story: Are Diamonds Forever?’. Business Horizons. Vol 44, Issue 3, 37. Available from: http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?sid=9017adc8-8141-48a4-a556-316e59e93d49%40sessionmgr4005&vid=1&hid=4114&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=bth&AN=4461832. Date accessed: [21/04/14].

 

 

 

 

‘There’s a lot in this show that is round or round-ish: pots, dots, diamonds, spinning paintings, flies, pills, balls and tightly coiled cigarette butts – a seemingly endless variation on a theme of full stops that refuses to put a stop to anything, least of all itself.’

 

HIGGIE, J. (2012). ‘Damien Hirst’. Frieze. 148. Available from: http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/damien-hirst/. Date accessed: [20/04/14].

‘Light represents the goodness all that is clear clean and visible.’

 

b. TATE GALLERY. (2012). ‘Damien Hirst: Art and Life’.  Available from: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/damien-hirst. 5:20 minutes. Date accessed: [16/04/14].

 

 

 

‘It seems hard to imagine that something so immediate and compelling as the pursuit of desires and the enjoyment of life’s pleasures could be, in truth, ephemeral. Perhaps only at birth and death does life’s fragility – the fine line separating presence from absence – become readily apparent. For this very reason, the vanitas theme was developed as a moralizing counterbalance, reminding humankind time and again that the worldly experience of reality is nothing more than vapour, shadow, and smoke.’

‘In the works gathered here, manifestations of beauty counterbalance darkness, loss, and decay to reveal the fundamental capacity of art to transform an awareness of death into enduring human expression.’

 

RAVENAL, J. (2000).Vanitas: Meditations on Life and Death in Contemporary Art. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts: Virginia. 32.

 

 

 

 

The Cancer Chronicles:

‘There are some splendid verses:

Withered by truth

And faced with your death

I stand alone at your flyblown corpse

And wonder where the fuck does

Everyone go?’

 

 

 

‘…there’s only ever been one idea in art and all great art wrestles with that question… The question of existence and mortality.’

 

BEARD, G; GALGUERA, H; GALGUERA, G. (2006). The death of God: towards a better understanding of life without God aboard a ship of fools. Other Criteria: London. 9.