Skip to main content

Go to:   
Guardian Unlimited
Search:
Guardian Unlimited Web
Guardian Unlimited ArtsArts critics
Home Culture Vulture blog Live reviews Art Dance Classical Special reports Help
News Film & Music weekly CD reviews Jazz Theatre Rock/pop Picks of the week Podcasts

Jonathan Jones

 Search Arts
 
 





Art

Damien Hirst/David Bailey

*** Gagosian, London

Jonathan Jones
Monday May 10, 2004
The Guardian


Whenever a contemporary artist turns to religious imagery, critics nail in the cliches. The cross and emotional depth are held to be identical. The pietà means more than a cow in a tank.

In fact, a modern artist has more chance of making a spiritual statement by suspending sausages in a vitrine than by resurrecting the lapsed iconographies of Christian painting and sculpture. There has not been a masterpiece of Christian art since the 18th century; the story of art since the Romantic era can be written as a history of attempts to find an alternative spiritual language, from Van Gogh's sunflowers to Warhol's sainted celebrities to Hirst's forlorn animals.



What, then, are we to make of Hirst's explicit use of religious symbols and stories in his recent work? In fact, there is anything but a consistently spiritual quality to Hirst's splashing about of thorns, nails, blood, martyrs' attributes and flowers from the Garden of Eden. It's rather that, living in a culture devoid of poetry, he can't get over the sheer excess of meaning in the Christian themes of suffering, death and redemption.

But he doesn't believe any of it. At least that's what this show suggests. Why else would Hirst want to work with David Bailey, if not to mock his own grandiloquence? The flashy, trashy, swinging London survivor is scarcely in his league. Together they depict Christ's road to Calvary in 12 glossy sexy-violent images that subject the Stations of the Cross to the vacuous visual plenitude of advertising. The big shiny photographs are framed in creepy marble-effect tabernacles that suggest some sinister Jesuit church in Rome. The blood and torture seem satanic rather than holy. Far from belief, Hirst communicates utter mystification, and dislike.

In one image we see the artist fully exposed, his willy hanging down as he personifies the man Mel Gibson calls "The Christ". It's typical of the weird compulsion to confess that has also seen Hirst publish his poetry and chronicle something that may be a conversion, a marital crisis or a nervous breakdown in powerful recent works. This time the water remains water, and the bread is just bread, and he lets the religious iconography exhaust itself.

· Until June 6. Details: 020-7292 8222.




Useful links
Theatre, dance, music and art venues in London and across the UK
More by our critics




Printable version | Send it to a friend | Save story


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006