Vermeer's Victoria Sponge.

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Sunday, 22 April 2012

Drowning in formaldehyde solution. .(scribbled at 23:44 )

My previous visit to Tate:
Looks like this was taken 10 years' ago, not last month.

Well, I finally saw the Damien Hirst retrospective. I've been uncharacteristically busy over the past 2 weeks though; what with going back to my desolate hometown for a week and thus having a mound of work to get back on with on returning to the office on Monday.

As it's showing until September, I have a feeling I'll be making return visits (for those actually willing to fork out £14 to see an art exhibition, do go see it). And Perhaps I've been living a deprived life until now, but this was my first time seeing Damien Hirst's work (that I can recall anyway). I went on Friday night, (naïvely) hoping to avoid the queues. Ha!

Actually, it wasn't immensely busy. Nothing on the Leonardo show, where you didn't have room to swing a gerbil, let alone a cat. What I noticed more about this than any other exhibition that I've been to was how much of a spectacle it was. No one stood to stop and stare at the works; most visitors just passively walked past the classic medicine cabinets and spot paintings and just raced towards the carcasses suspended in vitrines.

A Thousand Years (2010)
©ArtNet

Perhaps this is what to be expected though, given the hype this exhibition has received over the past few months. My personal highlight being Waldemar Januszczak’s war against Noel Fielding via Twitter after Fielding interviewed Hirst on C4 earlier this month. The war's still on-going, come to think of it. Additionally, Hirst has caused a tiny bit of controversy with the merchandise that Tate is selling. In addition to the glossy paint-splattered skulls retailing at an eye watering £36, 800, you too can get your own bit of Hirst in your life with the Damien Hirst recommends section in the Tate Bookshop, which includes classic books that any art historian would be familiar with (Shock of the New, Ways of Seeing, etc.) Now, I'm pretty sure Hirst was familiar with these at Goldsmiths. But do I think he really recommended these books for the Hirst exhibition?

Spoiler alert: No

Regardless of all this, I’m a huge fan of the butterfly wallpaper. A fan of some of his work too. He really knows how to capture an audience (albeit, with the smell of rotting flesh from the head of a recently deceased cow) but there’s this obscure quality to his work, which does make you suddenly engrossed, almost gawping at several pieces.

As circular canvases go
this one's a personal favourite;
Ikon Gallery, July 2011

I almost like how his most beautiful pieces are the most depressing. Take the butterfly paintings, for example. Visitors queue up to walk through this space filled with the most astounding butterflies. A fantastic experience, it evokes this great sense of hope and life, after being previously submerged in reminders of your own mortality. And this is such a beautiful feeling, until you take a second glance, moments later to notice the canvasses on the walls.

They’re adorned with hundreds, maybe thousands of dead butterflies.

Life is precious.

As Hirst says:

You can only cure people for so long and then they're going to die anyway.

Post formaldehyde, and on the route out, I stopped via Joseph Beuys: Artist Rooms. And then returned once more to the Yayoi Kusama's retrospective before finishing the evening with a glass or two of rather good vin rouge in Mile End.

Anyway, enough about the inevitability of death being explored through contemporary art, there's cheesecake to devour:

Labels: ART DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE, Contemporary Art, Damien Hirst at Tate Modern, Hirst Retrospective

about

diaristic ramblings about architecture, design, art, baking and shoes.

...all posts penned by Vikki, a twenty-something girl based in London (but currently having itchy feet and wanting to move back to Neuilly).

all these poorly taken photographs are indeed my own.

Vermeer's Victoria Sponge.