Post War and Contemporary Art

Celebrated and controversial, artist, entrepreneur, collector, filmmaker, market maverick and well-rehearsed rebellious chameleon, Damien Hirst, rose to unparalleled prominence as a member of the Young British Artists in 1990s London. One of the first bodies of work to achieve Hirst recognition was his Medicine Cabinets series, literal boxed arrangements of medical tablets, serums, containers and dispensers, superficially minimalist pop color coded sculptural compositions, echoing the crisp contours of Judd and LeWitt constructions, with a self-assured disruptive nihilistic depth of concept. In part inspired by a youthful near fatal accident when a toddler Hirst mistook prescription pills for candy resulting in an emergency stomach pump, the works demonstrated the aesthetically alluring decoration of the outer shell concealing the dangerous contents effectively identifying the translucent veil between antidote and poison. Collectively sanitized generic readymade Cornell boxes depicting a disordered organization of a disturbingly compulsive collector, shines to a specific psychosis. Brightly coated with a deadly serious beneath, a subtler harbinger of his later shockingly confrontational entombed carcass specimens and opulently bedecked skulls and pharmaceuticals. This series of installations began Hirst’s career spanning artistic exploration of the beauty in systems of mortality and decay.

The inevitable constant of death has remained a cardinal theme to Hirst’s work, as that which does not live cannot die, it could be argued that life is also of thematic importance to the artist or at very least an attempt to define the delicate distinction between the inherently linked states. An overt Memento Mori, Love Will Tear Us Apart, 1995 allegorically appropriates its title from Joy Division’s post punk breakout single, that tortured iconic front man Ian Curtis, tragically took his own life before he could see the successful reception of. A call back to Hirst’s seminal Medicine Cabinet series, which brashly borrowed it’s titles from the track list of punk pioneers the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bullocks, this installment more directly explores the vital/fatal drug duality with the sterile packaged syringes, crucial instruments of healthcare and the addicts tool of self-inflicted sickness, depending on the plunger’s pilot, comprising the systematic compartmentalized display. Curtis embodying the mortal moral for this tonic, toxic correlation, his painfully British stoic suffering through the medical mismanagement of his Epilepsy, the crippling collateral depression of its treatment contributing to his ultimate suicide the evidentiary archetype. The unintended caustic consequence of a cure is the crux of this conceptual biscuit, mirroring Hirst own childhood brush with overdose death to a degree. The star-crossed romanticism of the contradiction within the title as well introduces a parallel interpretation. Hopelessly “Love Will”, not ‘Love Can”, this a love so powerful it is destined for self-destruction, readably a poetic description of addiction. The needles grimly point to an intravenous drug user unable to escape the dragon’s fateful flames. Hirst no stranger to struggles with excess, having experiential knowledge of the sparkling skull and crossbones that is overindulgence in a good thing, even if that goodness is merely perceived. That which we think will bring us joyful salvation being also the device that designs our demise, seems an absolute sadness of existence. It has been sardonically said that the words love, God and drugs can be interchangeable expressions of longing and fulfillment in any rock and roll lyric. Hirst whose own cult of personality brilliantly blurs the lines between artistic and rock star popular celebrity, synthesizes all three subjects to a complex singular science in the provocatively poignant Love Will Tear Us Apart, a starkly severe still life instilled with life.