IDES OF MARCH 2005

“Notes Toward an (Im)probable Review” … Or, “Damien Hirst does Gerhard Richter doing Damien Hirst” - “Damien Hirst: The Elusive Truth!” @ Gagosian Gallery (New York) - www.gagosian.com

AESTHETIC CARNAGE - Thirty macabre, horrifying, stunning, beautiful, monstrous paintings surveying the wreckage of late-modernity … Surgical strikes (clinically-precise and chilling) in paint … Operating rooms, autopsy tables, two skulls (one out-sized, one crumbling), images collected ostensibly from the vapid stream of contemporary (so-called) ‘news’ media, transposed into ‘photo-realistic’ paintings (with very large prices attached) … Eery echoes of Richter’s “Atlas” project … Serial images of the approach of death plus pharmaceutical chic, or exquisite and obsessive paintings of pills as modern-day potions, scalpels, incisions, scenes of disenchantment (de facto ‘dismemberment’), alienation, and abject-self-visited-upon-abject-self in the form of the hyper-machinic, warped-mirror creatureliness of post-humanism (the condition wrought by the twin agencies, double-headed beastliness, of technological nihilism and hubris) … 

An archaeological survey of death and destruction, then … Antiseptic (cool, minimal) sketches of the multi-faceted ‘face’ of gemstones with scientific (syn)tag (in French) … Demure (coquettish) lines tracing a wilful analytic, insofar as they represent another layer of obsession with order teetering at the edge of the abyss (maelstrom) of nothingness of/within all notional, representational orders (1) … Dark, crystalline matter emerging into light (and super-imposed, by the eye, for the eye … into the picture-plane, mocking perspectival space) … Serial patches of color (color charts), arrayed in grids on flat-white surfaces … Mock-heroic mayhem and chaos in Iraq (mirroring the mayhem and chaos at home, just below the surface of things) … 

Tableaux of the decaying state of things and its perverse aestheticization (through its endless reproduction, dissemination, and replication … inclusive of in, through, and by the thing otherwise known as ‘contemporary art’ …) … An exhorbitant art-for-the-absent-gods’-sake (mutilated ‘musings’) … 

Painting through (by way of) the crippling lens of the ‘archival’ impulse (pace Richter … pace Derrida, after Foucault … a virulent ‘Archive Fever’ …) … Listing to and fro, between the vacuous horror of the everyday and the impossible appeal of the indivisible remainder (as Zizek has disclosed, the very absent center or ‘Cartesian’ subject of all phantasmatic encounters, with the irreal, the real, or otherwise) …

A close brush with death, brushing life against the grain, countering the calamity of the present-day morasse of creeping determinism (late-capitalism) with the elective désir of the mutable-estranged image (anti-milieu) and its provisional ‘anti-nature’ as obstacle/spectacle … Obstructing the path to the aesthetic with a withering (damning) anti-aesthetic ‘aesthetic’ (again), as one might labor -- insistently (in any vineyard worth its salt, ‘salted with salt’) -- to derail any detour into the autistic paths, the puerile gardens of the imagination-which-looks-away (toward personal, ‘elective’ utopias left, right and -- significantly -- off-center) … Painting-as-discourse up against the wall and bleeding … A wholly, preternaturally bizarre, life-affirming dance with death (the danse macabre of notational orders) … Which is why the cover of Modern Painters (March 2005) shows the artist reading the newspaper, in his studio in Brixton, in front of a painting of a giant skull, nonchalantly and putatively ‘oblivious’ (photograph by Gautier Deblonde)* … 

Merci/mercy, Damien … 

GK (New York, 03/15/05)

ENDNOTES / ETCETERA

1 - Géométrie, ou “l’éducation de l’oeil” - “4.6.6. L’expérience de la vie, mais aussi, comme le dit un peu plus haut Diderot, l’éducation de l’oeil. Ce qui ne nous avance guère. Et cependant c’était deux choses différentes, pour l’architecte, de travailler à main levée ou en s’aidant d’une règle.” Hubert Damisch, Traité du Trait: Tractatus tractus (Paris: Réunion de Musée Nationaux, 1995), p. 118

For “Damien Hirst does Edgar Degas doing Damien Hirst” at the Lever House, see http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/looking_awry2.html … 

*The article/interview in Modern Painters, pp. 52-59, shows the paintings now at the Gagosian Gallery in the studio of Hirst (in South London) amid the vast, detritus-strewn interior of their ‘place of their taking-place’ …

The catalogue for “The Elusive Truth!” is forthcoming from Gagosian … In the meantime, see DAMIEN HIRST / PRESENT-PAST in the form of Eduardo Cicelyn, Mario Codognato, Mirta D’Argenzio, Damien Hirst - The Agony and the Ectasy: Selected Works from 1989-2004 (Naples: Electa, 2004) - Paper, 263 pages, ISBN 8-85100-272-X - Exhibition catalogue, Museo Archeologico Nazionale (October 31, 2004 through January 31, 2005) … / MERCHANDIZING, ETC - Gagosian is offering about half-a-dozen variations on the book of Hirst drawings From the Cradle to the Grave published last year in Europe by Booth Clibborn, including de luxe ‘boxed’ versions with a signed drawing enclosed (for maximum dollars). The lowest form of this publication sells for $330, unsigned (ISBN 1-904-21203-4). A signed copy goes for $560 (ISBN 1-904-21206-9). The limited edition runs to 7500 copies (though it is unclear if the upper-upper-level versions are included in this count) … There is also a black t-shirt with skull available as memento mori (a reminder to die) …

BACKTRACKING / SUNLIGHT ON FLOWERS - Damien Hirst, Stuart Morgan, Damien Hirst: No Sense of Absolute Corruption (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 1996) - Paper, 126 pages, ISBN 1-880-15408-0 - Exhibition catalogue (May 4 through June 15, 1996) - Interview (by Stuart Morgan), April 2, 1996: “DH: If you have a box of dead snakes and you put a few live ones in, it looks as if they’re all moving. / SM: How do you feel about nature? / DH: I’ve seen better (laughs). There isn’t anything else.” (p. 4) / “SM: What else do you want to do? / DH: I want people to be frightened. That gets harder. Frightened of themselves.” (p. 24) / “SM: Do you feel divorced from nature? / DH: I wish I was. I like it when the outside comes inside. I like sunlight on flowers. I like ashtrays.” (p. 26)

Re Gerhard Richter, see http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/richter.html …

RECENT RICHTER - Gerhard Richter & Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Doubt and Belief in Painting (New York: MoMA, 2003) - Paper, 280 pages, ISBN 0-870-70355-2 / Gerhard Richter & Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting (New York: MoMA, 2002) - Cloth, 340 pages, ISBN 0-870-70357-9 / Gerhard Richter & Dieter Schwarz, Gerhard Richter: Drawings 1964-1999 (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2000) - Cloth, 320 pages, ISBN 3-933-80704-2 / Robert Fleck w/ Gertrud Koch & Hans Ulrich Obrist, Gerhard Richter (Paris: Editions Dis Voir, 1995) - Paper, 128 pages, ISBN 2-906-57140-7
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