When I asked my mum if she fancied visiting Damien Hirst’s exhibition in the Tate Modern, she flatly refused. My mum’s a vegetarian, I’m not sure if that has something to do with it, but she did say something rather intriguing which stuck in my mind while I meandered through the carcasses, cigarette butts and coloured dots:
“On his death bed Damien Hirst will probably gesture two fingers up to the art world, ‘ha ha I fooled you all,’ he will say, ‘this was never art!’”
The public didn’t seem to know what to do after entering the exhibition, exhibits were half queued for and individuals seemed panicked that no pieces had cordons surrounding them. In fact, the floor of almost every room was littered with precarious exhibits, sheep heads lay in small tanks on the ground and those stools/ladders that you get in libraries, had bowls balanced on them full of gore that looked like a congealed inbred mass of animal tissue and honey. I believe that Hirst wanted us to experience the feeling of panic, of not knowing where to tread, or which way to go, in order to exhibit us alongside his spectacles. Yet, it all added to the truly surreal but almost magical experience.
The exhibition reminded me of a nineteenth century pleasure garden, full of new ideas and eccentric performances, each bigger and more ridiculous than the room before. So many unrelated items and bodies seemed to find harmony amongst their methodical ordering and tidiness.
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, (the shark in a tank) embodied all the life of a terribly violent creature and yet it was made completely vulnerable, contained behind glass, motionless, with hook marks in its dorsal fin and small puncture marks all over the flesh, where I assume it has been pumped full of formaldehyde. This lay alongside Lullaby, the Seasons which reworked traditional depictions of the ‘four seasons’ by using hundreds of coloured pills. In four separate panels, each piece corresponded to the colours associated with that time of year. The colours affiliated with spring made me laugh, as pastel colours are in fashion this season, and I have at least three tops that would complement these drugs.
I think you have to think about this exhibition in terms of rooms, rather than individual pieces, as the exhibits are merely the centre pieces of a visually decorative space. My two favourite rooms are definitely:
In and Out of Love: a room filled with live butterflies, feeding off fruit and landing on people; a haven of complete calm and wonder.
Judgement Day: every teenage girl’s dream. A room filled with a f*** load of diamonds (cubic zirconia) mounted on shelves, surrounded by gold wallpaper. In the middle of the room is another shark. I felt like I was in a Bond movie!
From the exhibition I moved to the gift shop for a cheeky look around and I could not believe what was on sale!! You name it, they had it:
Plates
Clocks
Replica skulls
Hoodies
Skateboards
Scarfs
Deck chairs
Puzzles
Umbrellas
(All covered with Hirst’s art)
Wallpaper
And prints, some priced at an excess of £18,000
Wow Hirst, you have really capitalised on this exhibition and then I realised… maybe mum was right!
Damien Hirst
At the Tate Modern
4 April – 9 September 2012
£12.20 for students
Book in advance.