tomewing:

Now THIS is a bad review.

A hasty response.

Alright, between this and that Village Voice write-up from a few months back, it just seems like people are trying to slap him in the face as hard as they possibly can.

I have very little respect for Hirst, and would probably have kept on loathing him had I not stopped to read this review — which is less of a review and more of an attempt to prove just how quickly Loving Damien Hirst is going out of vogue. It’s sort of like when Pitchfork, fearing for its relevance, suddenly turns tail on an old darling. The best way to cut ties is to cut them quickly.

The funny thing is that Damien Hirst seems to have realized this too, which is why he suddenly takes a painterly, figurative turn. Oddly enough, the one big question Jones fails to ask is that which is arguably the biggest question to ask: why figurative painting, and why now? Why a leap from the superflat, blatantly effortless works he’s churned out for over twenty years, to the stilted, unsure still-life works which make up Two Weeks, One Summer? Hirst has been all about getting the most mileage out of the least effort. Now, you can’t help but look at one of these paintings and see the effort in every brushstroke, an effort which Jones considers entirely wasted.

I don’t want to speak to the quality of the paintings because I haven’t yet made up my mind about them. (Yes, at first glance they are “bad,” but then so is a lot of the stuff to come out of the early twentieth century. It really is the thought that counts; how the paintings look is not as important as asking why they might look the way they do — or, more correctly, how their look “speaks.”) Rumor has it that Hirst is an excellent draftsman, even though (1) a drawer does not always a painter make, and (2) I’m not concerned with his art-school history. But it’s saddening to consider the consequences of bottoming out: where do you go after you’ve peddled what may be the most banal work presently conceivable? It’s clear that the question guides these paintings in some way, and even literally, as the familiar dot-grid pattern sits on top of these paltry still-life paintings (albeit as an all-white, heavily worn ghost of the spot paintings).

Strangely the idea didn’t even click until I saw a picture of what seems to be the only three-dimensional piece in the show. It’s called The Battle Between Good and Evil, a work in the vein of E-Z-Concept pieces like The Physical Impossibility of Death…: it’s like an ad, and can be pretty much understood at one glance. (That piece was presumably chosen to accompany the paintings because it, too, continues the dot motif.) But where The Physical Impossibility…makes lazy swats at sublimity (as do many of his other works), The Battle Between Good and Evil makes no grand gesture. It doesn’t even feel like he phoned it in! There is no entry point into The Battle, at least not as accessible an entry like those in his other works. It doesn’t provoke with its superficiality, nor does it anger with ease (even if the piece itself does seem like yet another Hirst-style “readymade”). The piece just seems to sit there, able to do nothing but be looked at pitifully. 

I haven’t seen the show in person, but I can only imagine the two spheres lolling around in the weak stream of air burbling up from below. In my mind they seem as pitiful as the white dots on the canvases: Hirst’s attempts at concealing insecurity with cool, detached glossiness are cracking up. It’s almost as he’s spent a career flattening himself as much as possible, and is now making an attempt to breathe life into that fake, flattened self. This isn’t simple banality; it’s a shaky attempt to find a new direction, which can be an incredibly vulnerable situation to work through. This is the only batch of work by Hirst that’s actually made me think about what he’s doing. I find it compelling, even if I don’t immediately like it. Don’t chalk me up as a fan just yet, but this may be the start of something new.