Damien Hirst: Natural History

An exhibition that summarizes Hirst's most famous works, capable of unsettling the spectator even after almost 30 years.

When I speak of Damien Hirst to someone who does not know him, the first approximation I can formulate is “that one with the shark in formalin”. Reducing the career of one of the greatest living British artists to that is probably ungenerous, but the approximation often works. The shark immobilized inside the chemical bath has become an iconic image of contemporary art. I have always found the image in question to be extremely powerful. So you can only imagine my excitement when I learned that some of these works would be exhibited at Gagosian in London. I was lucky this exhibition took place exactly when I was going to be in town for other reasons. This providential coincidence took me away from the embarrassment of having to justify my trip with tanks full of formalin to relatives and friends.

For Hirst, this is a complex moment. He is back from two great performances, which I got to see and describe. Archaeology Now is the ideal completion of a meta-historical trend, made up of fake ancient finds and pop culture. Cherry Blossom, on the other hand, is something new, perhaps not entirely complete, but with immense potential. It is an art steeped in escapism and beauty for bad and claustrophobic times. In the meantime, however, there was also the scandal of the skull studded with diamonds, never really sold at the monstrous figure that was talked about. Hirst sometimes runs the risk of being famous because he is famous, but he is aware of it, and in recent years he has played with it extensively. This exhibition, organized with no advance notice and which I only learned about thanks to the artist’s Instagram profile, comes as a piece to cover the controversies of recent months. Ideally, he wants to remind the public that we are not dealing with just any provocateur, but with an artist who can boast 30 years of success.

It is interesting how this concept of formalin (or formaldehyde, to be precise) is now so long-lived. “I wanted a shark that’s big enough to eat you, and in a large enough amount of liquid so that you could imagine you were in there with it,” says Hirst, talking about his shark. It is difficult not to make this association of thought because, although the exhibit features only animals, it is almost natural to think of a person in their place. So what does the author want to tell us? Without putting words in his mouth, what follows is my humble interpretation. Hirst is obsessed, like many, with the great themes of Western thought: death, faith, nihilism, and existence. His work of preserving is almost repairing a wrong, stopping the time that inevitably undoes things. The original shark was titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living and is a fitting title for a work where not even the subject is clear: will it be the animal shark? The shark icon of strength/fear? Or is it formalin rather, or is it us?

One of the early sharks from 1993.

There are no simple answers, indeed, there are probably no answers at all, but I find the premise acceptable. I understand the author’s rage toward the human condition. But be careful: it is not just a desire to rebel against physical death, but to stop the very effects of decay. Even if we are brave enough not to fear our annihilation, how can we endure it in our loved ones? And even if we were detached enough from everyone not to fear it, how can we bear it in the beauty that surrounds us? Isn’t the idea that in 100, 1,000, or 10,000 years something like Michelangelo’s Last Judgment will no longer exist enough to keep us awake at night? Or worse still, the idea that in all that time there will be something equally beautiful that we will not be able to see, does it not make us very sad? Hirst tries to rebel against this, sealing his creatures and mythologies in formalin. It is not just about animals, but from how the titles of entire myths suggest. On one side we find Cain and Abel, on the other the Baptist, up to a triptych reminiscent of a Renaissance crucifixion.

Now, before expressing a judgment on the exhibition, we must ask ourselves a question: are they beautiful works? Here we enter into the realm of personal judgment, yet in my opinion, despite their crudeness, they are. Or they are beautiful because of their cruelty. A perfectly preserved sheep is beautiful because that animal is beautiful and it is almost tender that someone has thought of keeping it. But they are also terrible works because they are animals that have been killed and torn to pieces, before ending up on display for our entertainment. The gallery staff swears that they were animals that died for other causes or were not bred/killed for that purpose, but it remains a violent sight. Even exposing them in such an aseptic way, as an 18th-century wunderkammer, is not enough to make them less strong. Indeed, the title is almost provocative: because it is not a natural story, but a human one that we have in front of us. Every story for Hirst is necessarily a human story, even if we use animals as a pretext to portray it. In doing so, we cover our stories and hide them under a layer of “naturalness” with which we justify them.

As for judgment, the answer is complicated. You do not leave the exhibition with that serenity that Cherry Blossom transmitted, but with a sense of suspension, almost of annoyance. The greatest criticism can perhaps be made of the initial premise, rather than its realization. I understand that in people who do not share Hirst’s vision such installations may not resonate. Many people are perfectly convinced that a lifetime is enough and that there is no point in trying to anchor things that by their nature flow away, including people. Towards this position, I have a mixture of admiration and fear; therefore, I understand the artist’s efforts to try to preserve things. After all, it has been one of the “works” in art over the centuries. What prompted those cavemen and women to leave the imprint of their hands on a cave wall if not the desire to exist for a longer time than their lives? This is probably a futile attempt, now as it was then, but no less deserving of pursuit.

We do not know if Hirst’s work will last over time and for how long. What we can consider, however, is that the first pieces on display are over 30 years old. Three decades may seem short, but they are an almost geological time in contemporary art and in the society in which we live. Certainly, Hirst is managing to keep himself as an artist in the formalin of his display tanks, something of which - I think - he must be extremely proud.

Cherry Blossom by Damien Hirst at Fondation Cartier

In art history manuals, it is often written how great artists have almost a sixth sense in interpreting and understanding the era in which they live better than all others around them. There is a German term, Zeitgeist, which precisely means “spirit of the time,” and knowing how to grasp it is a supreme sign of an artist’s skill. If we were to find the spirit of our time, the things that best represent it, we could easily list the pandemic, distance, the metaverse, the network, and the crisis. Many more or less famous artists already do this with considerable results. Take a pop-cultural phenomenon like Banksy. His street art transforms walls into an apparent mirror of the dystopian society in which we live, according to many. Up to here, we can say that the speech is “easy,” but correct. But what happens when we subvert this recipe?

Imagine someone wants to identify the last two years as a joyful and carefree time, full of colors and with a friendly nature that surrounds us. None of us would describe the experience of the pandemic and everything that followed. Damien Hirst, on the other hand, in this exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, does just that: he bombards us with 30 canvases of cherry trees in bloom. The canvases themselves are beautiful, with bright colors, dense and material brushstrokes, more like Pollock than pointillism. Unlike action painting, however, these paintings are deeply figurative and unexpectedly joyful. After all, the title itself, “Cherry Blossoms,” can only evoke happy things. Of course, there is also the issue of death and withering but always faced with a delicacy that I would dare to call classic. They are paintings that we could define as lighthearted, but of that lightheartedness which one arrives at either from very young or very old.

The cherry trees are unambiguously figurative, in an almost provocative way.

It is immediately clear that our age is not a carefree moment. Indeed, it is the opposite, with the pandemic that has engulfed everyone with anxieties and doubts. So how can an artist in 2021 literally surround us with flowers? I think this is his answer to the very time we live in. Instead of painting sad things, Hirst did what many of us did during the pandemic: decorate our homes, grow a plant, make our world a little more comfortable. Before attending the exhibition, I was curious if it would give me the sense of a golden prison. This tendency to want to decorate one’s own small space can sometimes lead to this indeed. However, you never breathe this air; on the contrary, the canvases are so airy that they do not enclose us in space but open it up again.

It is also interesting to see the reaction of people to the paintings. Many photograph them because it is now natural: when we see something beautiful, we want to share it. Hirst showed great courage in doing this: having created something unmistakably beautiful in contemporary art. The beauty is then probably contagious, and this is reflected in the mood of the visitors: far from the frenetic pace of the great museums, you could breathe more the air of a Sunday trip than of an art exhibition. After all, beauty and lightheartedness are perhaps the things that we have missed most in the evenings alone in front of the computer, so why not make a feast?

It is impossible to escape the instinct of taking a picture of the flowers!

However, the starting point remains: beyond a “consumer” art, which makes us feel good now, will there be something left? When we think of 2021 in art, will we think of cherry trees in bloom? The obvious answer seems to be no: it is a reality too distant from what we live in this moment to take root in our imagination. It is no coincidence that at this moment, it is street art or political artists who have a new voice and following, at times when society and debate are so polarized. I find both of these genres quite boring. While it’s impossible to deny their artistic value, I wonder: haven’t we seen enough of this? Our eyes are flooded with tragic images, inequalities, surveillance, and metaverses. I don’t want to say that everything is fine as it is and it makes no sense to change it, but I think this bombardment leads more to addiction and apathy than to change.

However, this is not the first era in which art expresses something different from the popular sentiment of the moment. Let’s think about the birth of impressionism: between Manet’s Breakfast on the Grass and Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, there are in just seven years the Franco-Prussian war, the defeat of Sedan, the fall of Napoleon III, the suppression in blood of the Commune, and the difficult birth of the new republic. But seen through the paintings, that era is for us full of colors, compositional freedom, and new horizons that open up.

Was Hirst on the same mission to make us think of 2021 as a year of flowering instead of sadness? We can’t know. Time will bring us the answer in a few years. Personally, however, I think it has possibilities, for several reasons. First, these canvases are part of a larger work that will be dispersed among museums and collections in the coming years. I predict that many of them will arrive in distant and growing countries, which will feel the message of flowering particularly appropriate. Moreover, I think it will be important for us too to take ourselves a little less seriously after these complicated years and to give ourselves a little beauty. Not because we deserved it, but because, much more simply, it is there within our reach, just outside the window.