I am perfectly aware that Hirst’s show, No Love Lost, Blue Paintings, opened to the public a month ago. I purposely tried very hard not to engage in this exhibition of “new” works, surprisingly to no avail. It seems like every time Hirst has an exhibition in London the entire city goes into mania. He is the artist everyone loves to hate, hates to love, controversial enough to be a household name, and everyone (including their mothers) has an opinion about his practice. To put it simply, if overexposure had a baby it’s name would be Damien Hirst.

Overexposure is also the reason why I was swayed to visit the Wallace Collection and subsequently write about this exhibition. I wanted to see first hand what was so terrible about this particular exhibition to make the reviewing media turn on this artist so explosively. Hirst has completely stuck his neck out rendering himself vulnerable by making it very public that he manufactured this group of paintings by his own hand. Apparently he has been working on this series of paintings since 2006, the first one being the most simple of the series, Floating Skull. No longer does he have a multitude of assistants and manufacturers to hide behind. This is his hand, his work, and he is trying something new.

The problems that plague this show begin with the context of the Wallace Collection as a showing venue, and the stature of Hirst’s fame. This combined with the quality of these paintings that look more like studio work than finished pieces create a multitude of problems for the viewing public to digest. Though there are clear indicators that attach this series of work with the rest of his practice, his obsessions with mortality represented through the skull and ashtray; there is something lacking and amateur about this series. It was also highly presumptuous and pretentious in inserting himself and his work into the Wallace Collection, a museum focused on the eighteenth and nineteenth century. It is pretty obvious that he is trying to ingrain his practice within the connecting webs of art history. This summer Picasso was insert amongst the old masters at the National Gallery; everyone had their doubts but it was successful nonetheless because of the brazen connection between the works. In 2008, Jeff Koons successfully juxtaposed his super kitsch with the high baroque of the Palace of Versailles. Unfortunately Damien Hirst falls short with his pseudo Francis Bacon inspired paintings. There is no usual chutzpa that seems to be present in most of his work, where the public goes crazy for it and the art community jealously turns up their noses, but keeps an admiring eye on it. There is a meekness about this show that just seems out of character.

--David Yu

All Images Courtesy the Artist and the Wallace Collection

Images from Top to Bottom:(Installation View, No Love Lost, Blue Paintings, Photography by Billie Scheepers, c. Damien Hirst. All rights reserved; Damien Hirst, Floating Skull, 2006, 1018.54 x 767.08 mm, oil on canvas. Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd © Damien Hirst. All rights reserved, DACS 2009. Courtesy Damien Hirst and The Wallace Collection)

The current show on view at the South London Gallery, Nostalgia, puts the viewer in an unsettling place. I wouldn’t necessarily classify this exhibition only as a video installation, but as a conceptual art experience that deeply explores narrative devices in relation to human cognizance. The work is unsettling in terms of the ease with which one is absorbed by the videos, falling quicly and effortlessly into Omer Fast’s cleverly edited video looped sequences.

One leaves completely gratified by the experience of being able to follow the obvious conceptual trail of breadcrumbs that lead us through the three videos. Fast almost pats the viewer on the back whilst feeding us with a common reference point of building a partridge snare, seen repeatedly in all three films. Before we know it, we are caught in Fast’s narrative snare with previous information and fictional information co-mingling with twists and turns in the plot.  This twists rival the metafiction of a David Lynch film, but unlike a Lynch film, Fast’s work recovers itself in the layers of narratives and rewards us with meaning.

His work begins with the simple explanation and demonstration of how to make a small snare with a few sticks. The second room explores the origin of this explanation. It also connects it to a human level, a history of this skill being passed down through generation and the practical use of this skill within a community context. This information is indulged through an interview with an asylum seeker. The third room builds on the last narrative by completely dramatizing events through a fictional story of asylum seekers trying to locate themselves in a different culture. The narrative continuously brings us back to the instructions on how to build the snare; therefore causing us to continuously look for the signs that make us remember the previous segments. In a sense, all three narratives collapse into one creating a thorough “life experience” through the layers and how well we as an audience perceive and digest the information.

There are no starting points or ending points to these narratives. It is just information that is presented in an expanding format, layered to translate the full impact of how one would survive with only a few sticks and a loop. We repeat and revisit, learning over and over, one stick at a time. 

-- David Yu

All Images Courtesy gb Agency, Paris; Postmasters, New York; and Arratia, Beer, Berlin

Images from Top to Bottom: (Omer Fast, Nostalgia, 2009, production still, Photos: Thierry Bal)

Pumphouse Gallery

Battersea Park, London

SW11 4NJ

Telephone: +44 (0)20 7350 0523

Fax: +44 (0)20 7228 9062

Email: info@pumphousegallery.org.uk

Shake It: An Instant History of the Polaroid

Nobuyoshi Araki , Rut Blees Luxemburg , Guy Bourdin , Tim Braden, Roe Ethridge , Walker Evans, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, André Kertész , John Latham, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jonathan Monk, Lisa Oppenheim , Lucas Samaras , Michael Snow, Juergen Teller , Andy Warhol, Wim Wenders

6 October - 13 December 2009

Polaroid film no longer exists as of October 2009. The last batches of Polaroid film expired last month. If this is the first time that you have heard the news, I’m sorry. Last year Polaroid decided to stop manufacturing the film all together to reinvent the company into the digital age. Instant photos are iconic. Thankfully there is a memorial type exhibition at the Pumphouse Gallery to ease the pain. Shake It: An Instant History of the Polaroid showcases work by a multitude of artists through the decade that has made work/ documentation through the use of instant photos. If this exhibition still does not ease the pain of losing a treasured art form for many… not to worry, there is talk that Polaroid may sell off the rights so that another company can manufacture the film. Only time will tell.

-- David Yu

Image Courtesy Pumphouse Gallery

Walker Evan, Untitled, 1974