Bland Ambition

I had been putting off visiting Damien Hirst’s exhibition ‘The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011’ since it opened last month. Partly, this was a matter of money. According to Gagosian Gallery’s press release, the show was ‘conceived as a single exhibition in multiple locations’, designed to take place ‘at once across all of Gagosian Gallery’s eleven locations in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Rome, Athens, Geneva, and Hong Kong, opening worldwide on January 12 2012.’ By my rough calculations, in order to see the exhibition in its entirety, travelling economy class and, say, starting in Los Angeles travelling eastwards through all the listed locations, it would have cost me at least £1700 in airfares alone. Also, I did not wish to develop a case of DVT. The exhibition’s curatorial conceit appeared to be aimed at a collector class who would no doubt appreciate the chance it offered to visit all their holiday homes, although a competition – The Complete Spot Challenge – offered the chance to win a personalized print (edition size to reflect the number of registrants who complete the challenge) dedicated and signed by the artist. What an opportunity.

Mostly it was inertia that kept me from Hirst’s show. Every pompous parp of PR trumpeting about it merely reinforced my indifference; the same flat-line reaction I have each time I see Hirst leering at the camera in his press photographs, looking like a fossil from the Britpop era for whom time froze sometime around 1995 in the Groucho Club toilets with Keith Allen and Alex James. The more the artistic significance of Hirst’s spot paintings was asserted – epoch-defining facts about how these works were made over the course of 25 years and lent to Gagosian by more than 150 private individuals and public institutions from 20 countries, and, yes, the inevitable publicity shots of Hirst mugging it up – the heavier my shoulders shrugged.

Eventually, out of a sense of due diligence I finally cracked and visited Gagosian’s uptown and Chelsea galleries to see the New York variations of the spots. I wanted to see for myself what noted commentator Hennessy Youngman called ‘a perfect storm of banality’ actually looked like, and the banality did not disappoint. My breathing and pulse rate remained steady throughout the show. It was like eating a vanilla ice-cream in a branch of Gap stocked with a particularly beige seasonal clothing range. You might think that ‘beige’ is the wrong choice of word to describe these works, especially given that Hirst has described himself as a colourist. ‘I’ve always had a phenomenal love of colour…’ he states in the exhibition press bumpf. ‘I mean, I just move colour around on its own. So that’s where the spot paintings come from – to create that structure to do those colours, and do nothing. I suddenly got what I wanted. It was just a way of pinning down the joy of colour.’ And yet, seeing so many of them together in the same gallery spaces, ‘beige’ seemed to be the perfect description; together, these works were joyless and bland. Sure, there was variety enough. Big ones and small ones. Some with teeny dots, one with just four huge ones. There were circular canvases, long canvases, tall canvases and triangular canvases. Some looked appealingly handmade – the early works, mostly – with each dot rendered wonkily, or paint distributed unevenly; others were as charming in the uniformity of their facture as a branch of Starbucks in an airport departure lounge. Each iteration of the exhibition included works specific to their location – the press blurb gave some conceptually over-leveraged explanation about the ‘demographic fact’ of each city being used ‘to determine the content of each exhibition according to locality’ (so shouldn’t that be ‘geographic fact’?). Having only seen the New York spots, I can’t say if this was interesting or not. I suspect not because after a while the variety itself seemed a form of soulless, functional uniformity. Monotony can be an artistic strategy, but there are times when monotony is simply monotonous. These paintings do not pin down ‘the joy of colour’ because they are not paintings that allow colour to do anything other than look like sample swatches in a paint shop. If they were about chromatic pleasure, they might admit, say, adjacency – the zing of two colours jammed against each other – or tonal gradation, or bleaker corollaries of colours such as muddiness and darkness, or immersive washes that fill your field of vision, or varying temperatures. Only a very early work – simply called Spot Painting, made in 1986 – seemed to get close to this, painted with an unregimented, loopy energy that let the individual dots of colour dance promiscuously next to each other. Moving from painting-to-painting, between sizes and numbers of spots, a sense of visual rhythm could be established but, I wondered, what does that mean here and now in 2012? What does Hirst have to say about colour that’s not been said before? What are viewers of the show meant to take away with them? One Bridget Riley painting could teach me more about motion, rhythm and colour than eleven of these Hirst shows.

Alone, the spot paintings do little; they are like props waiting for an actor to animate them. And in Hirst’s favour, theatre has been his strong point as an artist – the drama in certain early installations, such as The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), was startling when I first encountered them. His spot paintings worked in dark concert with the sculptures – a shark in formaldehyde or a rotting cow’s head juxtaposed with the bland repetition of a spot painting or medicine cabinet. Flesh, decay, danger or death, up against the tightly regimented, controlled, impassive and antiseptic. Meaning existed in the chilly zone between a bisected calf and deadpan abstraction. What Hirst’s work hinted at was a nasty reality between bland corporate image management and the meat-space life they messed with. Without this conversation, the spot paintings abstract themselves to being merely polka dots, like the politely minimal background décor in a ’90s-themed restaurant. Hirst, the bad boy entrepreneur of 1990s British art, has finally become impresario of the dully tasteful. To see this show the same week that the tragic death of Hirst’s Gagosian stablemate Mike Kelley was announced only ramped up the sense of emptiness, the lack of drama. Compared to the experience of seeing Kelley’s ‘Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction’ and ‘Exploded Fortress of Solitude’ works shown at Gagosian’s Beverly Hills and London spaces last year, Hirst’s spot painting exhibition left me wanting. Give me spooky reconstructed high school photographs! Give me crystal grottos and superhero homes! Give me feature-length musical videos featuring vampires, hillbillies, demons and dancing pantomime horses! I want to see work with energy and – to use an unfashionable word – imagination, not the sight of someone trying to paddle up the dry creek of process-based minimal abstraction.

You could argue there’s something Warholian about the spot painting show; the blank repetition perhaps, or the unembarrassed Business Art side of it. The trouble is that Hirst has played Warhol’s game well, but it now feels like the wrong game for the times. Hirst knows how to dress a career with all the PR whistles and bells, how to turn out a quotable quote, get a rise out of us with some crass assertion of his love of money, but the truth is that nobody really cares anymore. Sure, his publicity people might be able to place a story in a weekend paper that’s got a gap to plug (Hirst, as a bona-fide cultural icon of the 1990s – which is not necessarily the same as being a great artist – will always be able to command some attention) but I doubt those column inches are based on reader interest. I can’t remember the last time I had a conversation with any artist, student, teacher, writer, dealer or curator about Hirst’s work – that is, the things he makes, rather than the side of Hirst’s work that is Being Damien Hirst. Perhaps the most interesting thing that could happen to one of these paintings right now is for one of them to be accidentally slashed by the arcing blade of a machete, wielded by a present-day American Psycho hedge-fund manager as he chops someone up in his multi-million dollar SoHo loft.

Such a fate would certainly say something about Hirst’s favourite subjects of life, death and money – the perennial themes running through his work. I’m open to the idea that there is a serious argument to be made for such themes in certain pieces. In the case of ‘The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011’, however, it’s true only inasmuch as it makes me aware of how little time I have on this planet and how little of it I wish to spend looking at these works. They appear exhausted, self-absorbed, vain. It’s like watching some over-the-hill but wealthy rock star convinced that he/she still has some relevance when the world around them has moved on. Hirst’s show conjures the world of music industry exploitation captured by The Smiths in their song ‘Paint a Vulgar Picture’: ‘Re-issue! / Re-package! / Re-package! / Re-evaluate the songs / Double pack, with a photograph / Extra track (and a tacky badge).’

I remember as an art student asking my tutor, the late critic Stuart Morgan, what he thought of Hirst. ‘Damien has said everything he has to say in his art’ was his reply. ‘He has nothing interesting left to tell us.’ This was in 1995, and at the time I wasn’t sure I understood what he meant. Seventeen years later, it’s abundantly obvious, all at once, at eleven locations worldwide.