Jay said to me he’s not important in the art world.
#Away from the flock windows
The art world? “I’ve lost sight of where they are.” He looks at the people at private views through gallery windows – “I don’t know who the fuck they are, drinking wine and eating cheese. The art world has gone from idolising Hirst in the 1990s to sneering at his recent work, including his vast museum of fake archaeology at the Venice Biennale. But bring in God, and I turn into a scientist and say there is no God.” You can still see the blood in his art, shining against the Alpine snow from his colossal science toy where biology and metaphysics collide. Then my parents got divorced and my mum left the church. Photograph: Prudence Cuming Associates/© Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. Rooted in Christian imagery … Hirst’s Away from the Flock. Catholicism, he confesses, pervades how he sees things. Because it’s not just meat.” That image of the “neglected” carcass of a sheep recalls his 1994 work Away from the Flock, a sheep in a vitrine with roots deep in Christian imagery. “I much prefer it when you’ve got this neglected thing like a sheep, which is meat – you’re thinking why am I feeling empathy? That’s a great thing because you should. It’s true – he intended to recreate a drawing by Leonardo that opens up a man and woman to show the anatomy of copulation.īut Hirst never did work with human bodies. He thought about getting a male and a female corpse, cutting them in half and fitting them together with his penis inside her – “like the Leonardo da Vinci drawing!” I say. Why did he never move on from putting animals in formaldehyde to pickling people? I ask Hirst a question I have always wanted to put to him. Today I still think he’s a great sculptor, even if he’s a lousy painter. It’s nice in the strange intimacy of Zoom to be able to tell him the truth, that when my own mother was having heart surgery in the 1990s I wandered the hospital seeing his vitrines in my head.
When I first saw his shark swim towards me at the Saatchi Gallery it was like nothing I had ever seen – it bit into my soul. But the truth is I’m a fan who gets cross when he fails to live up to my expectations. I have been very rude about him on occasion: I once wrote that his paintings resemble the art of a dictator surrounded by lackeys who are too scared to tell him he’s talentless. I was mildly surprised when Hirst’s PR got in touch to offer me an interview.
#Away from the flock install
Hirst had fun directing its creation over FaceTime, obsessing over heights and placings of exhibits in the town’s Protestant church and watching anxiously as the crew struggled to install a seaweed-sprouting giant called The Monk in the middle of a lake before it froze. Not for nothing is the show titled Mental Escapology. It’s like when I used to play Tomb Raider in the early days, and I went into a square in Venice and recognised it from the video game.” In fact, he says, “I’ve never been to St Moritz. Photograph: Felix Friedmann/©Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. And Hirst is in the same boat.Ī seaweed-sprouting giant … Hirst’s The Monk. But I can only explore Hirst’s Swiss show on my screen. I’d love to be there in person, dwarfed by this 21-foot-tall colossus called Temple, one of the variations on the theme of human dissection that started with his statue Hymn (1999-2005). He appears buried up to his loins in crisp clean snow.
#Away from the flock skin
The image that holds me most is a towering painted statue of a man with his skin peeled off to reveal the internal organs – bright blue aorta, red-veined heart, brown liver, sausage like intestines – all framed against the blue sky and white mountains of an Alpine vista. A spectacular survey of his art has just opened in St Moritz, Switzerland, that he orchestrated entirely by social media and phone. Worried about my kids.”Īt least he’s had a nice big lockdown project to distract him. I’m worried about my mum, she’s in Devon isolating. It can make you get into a hopeless place. It’s a hopeless thing if you’re not careful: the Covid crisis, Brexit. “It’s a knife-edge between life and death.
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