No Sense of Absolute Rebellion

Camus said that “In art, rebellion is consummated and perpetuated in the act of real creation, not in criticism or commentary.” Words of velocity . . . speeding before a sun-hammered ocean, Camus colored the form of modern thought. To the restless Algerian, rebellion was the flower of our ability to achieve, at the highest level. Damien Hirst’s show, No Sense of Absolute Corruption (May 4–June 15, 1996), would lay claim at least to the sheath of rebellion, as would, I’m sure, the artist himself. Yet Hirst’s cannon seems to prop itself upon the very artifice others have died trying to eradicate.

Outside the gallery on Wooster Street, art-world pros in sunglasses, expectancy snapping like a flag, I reflected on various irrelevancies—the twirl of last night’s vodka, a gauze of sensation, almost feminine. Inside, finally, the works: a rather florid array of giant spin paintings (four in all, three motorized); dot paintings (gender specific); a forty-foot rotating billboard; a colossal ashtray; a beach-ball suspended in an air current; and, of course, the physiological sculptures using the precipitous vapidity of death and continuation as media. Much of the work offers the requisite challenge of any truly original art. Original art is exacting; there is an undertow of repressed possibility, a peak demanding ascent. Hirst’s work elicits from us the confusion and tension of discovery. The scope of his vision—or medium—is overpowering. At a certain point, you’re hardpressed to deny the sheer power of the endeavor, yet you are also faced with the knowledge that this art is alive and viable only through commentary, vital only though its affectation.

Figure 1.

Damien Hirst, Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything, 1996 (detail). Steel, glass, plexiglass, cows, formaldehyde solution, 12 tanks. Each tank: 85 × 39 1/4 × 21 inches. Photo: Tom Powell; courtesy of Gagosian Gallery, New York.

My first glimpse of the artist’s work was of a cow’s baleful face, sheered off at the skull, held in place by plexiglass rods, in a shroud of formaldehyde: the snout tilting upward, as if commenting on the instinct for survival, of escape, the gray, fleshy tongue, protruding violently. The work, Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything (1996) consists of twelve steel-reinforced glass tanks displaying the prepared cross-sections of two cows suspended in the opaque liquid solution. I suppose I initially missed out on some deeper meaning, noting the choice cuts that would make no grill, faced not with the intensity of art, but rather the puerile curiosity of the sideshow, the shock at eye-level, in your face, so to speak. I was puzzled by the passivity of the viewers as they leaned forward to examine the tanks’ contents, herded together, led along.

This was Hirst’s first major publicized show in the United States (there was an earlier, ignored one, at the Cohen Gallery on Madison a few years back that was an exact replication of a British pharmacy). In a disquieting juxtaposition that set the tone for the entire show, three of the four giant spin paintings faced the cattle across a narrow corridor. Glossy household paint spiralling towards the gallery’s far corners—purple, orange, yellow, and red dominate, bowing only to their carnal derivations. A title—beautiful, childish, expressive, tasteless, not art, over simplistic, throw away, kids stuff, lacking in integrity, rotating, nothing but visual candy, celebrating, sensational, inarguably beautiful painting (for over the sofa): hats off to whichever obvious influence you care to mention. I resigned myself to the fact that I would enjoy the marks if they were created with anything approaching intimacy. The shadow of a smirk seemed to hover over us, as the motors stupidly whirred.

A handsome couple, stoned, pondered the wall-painting Blue for Girls and Pink for Boys—pastel circles tediously lined in rows of nothingness, the sort of work we are told to relish by the fashionable...