'Never let the truth get in the way .. . '
Mark Glazebrook went to Slovenia to look at Damien Hirst's first exhibition of drawings
Not very many 'Brit, . as Slovenes tend to call us, know the northern part of former Yugoslavia; but the graphic work of a number of British artists has made an impact in this region, now a fully fledged country, which borders both Italy and Austria. In 2001 Damien Hirst, following in the footsteps of Tilson, Hockney and Hamilton, won the Grand Prize in the 24th International Biennale of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia's visually delightful capital. He won it with his 'Last Supper' prints. Religious preoccupations, not to mention an exceptionally good taste in art and ideas, do lurk behind the showman's yobbish mask which belongs to this apparently irreverent YBA. His stimulating conversation, available in On the Way to Work, a book of interviews with Gordon Burn, is characteristically laced, nevertheless, with the usual four-letter words.
Following a Ljubljana tradition, Hirst was offered a one-man show to coincide with the 25th Biennale. Having accepted the offer, he has mounted his very first exhibition of drawings, more than 150 of them. In September, as the show ends, we are promised a more comprehensive, 336page book of drawings, to be published by 'other CRITERIA' (81 Gower Street, London WC1). The drawings offer an insight into a restless, slightly mixed-up but creative mind which seems to be as attracted to science, mathematics and medicine as it is to art history.
Unless a viewer is familiar with Hirst's paintings and his three-dimensional work, the show may be puzzling. In show-business terms, the rooms look civilised but somewhat bland at first glance. The elegant monotony of framed drawings is relieved by a single, but highly typical, large glass display case. Perhaps large photographs of other vit rines which are well known in England would have helped the local population.
To the question 'Can Hirst draw?' the answer is
'Of course'. It would seem that you cannot stop him. It emerges that Hirst has been a compulsive draughtsman from childhood on. Legend has it that his mother helped by never running out of bits of paper with which to feed his hungry hand. This show contains many quite different subjects, types and sizes of drawing. Hirst may investigate an actual skull or a woman's head in a painting by Delacroix. (There are many elements of the Romantic artist in Hirst.) Some drawings, at least one of them explicitly, show Hirst's fascination with the preoccupations of Francis Bacon. Hirst's spot paintings, which are interestingly different from each other in their shapes and in other ways, are worked out in ink on graph paper. These are studies. His spin drawings are in very soft lead pencil and stand on their own, like his spin paintings.
To the question 'How good are Hirst's drawings?', the answer is that even the simplest ones are good enough for his own purposes. They are rather good in their own way. Even in the drawing of a cigarette-filled ash-tray he shows a graphic gift as well as another slant on his obsession with death, or more accurately an obsession with the closeness of life to death. The drawings tend to be loose and fluent but precise when and where necessary so as to instruct those who make his vitrines. The drawings are also interesting as documents because Hirst frequently writes on them, using words, numbers and measurements. In his unselfconscious scribbled comments, however rude, Hirst shows a certain gift for language, a feeling for the telling or poetic phrase.
The relationship between the titles of the drawings and the drawings themselves is odd. Above three tragic creatures being crucified, part man, part animal, part carcase, Hirst has scribbled 'I blame the parents' and then 'Never let the truth get in the way of a good story'. Taking the chance offered by the British Council to interview Hirst briefly in Ljubljana, I questioned him on this mixture of profound subject matter and flippant comment. 'Actually, I blame God's Mum and Dad,' he quipped profoundly and flippantly, thereby broaching the problem of first cause while recalling, but with added sacrilege, Philip Larkin's 'They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to,
but they do.'
Few people in any coun try have seen Damien Hirst's drawings. It may even have been thought that he didn't do any. After all, the telephone is sometimes more useful than the pencil to the conceptual artist. It may have been thought that Damien Hirst just has to ring some farm in Devon where he now lives, or the abattoir, or the butcher, plus the formaldehyde suppliers, the electrician and the factory where vitrines come from and, hey presto!, a lamb or a sliced pig becomes an expensive work of art. Surely it would take no more than a couple of extra calls, to Jay Jopling and Charles Saatchi, perhaps, and an invoice from Hirst's firm Science Ltd., before a deal would be concluded?
If the task of an artist, even a conceptual artist, were that easy, we'd probably all be artists, thereby proving Joseph Beuys's ridiculous proposition that we are. One simple fact to emerge from this show is that Damien Hirst tends to begin his famous three-dimensional works by visualising each one clearly, with elegant precision and repeatedly, from different angles, in pencil on paper. This requires imagination, a sense of proportion, skill and practice. So Hirst is not so utterly different to traditional artists who draw, paint and sculpt as may have been thought. It would not surprise me if Hirst started carving or modelling one day.
It was Sickert who pointed out, about 100 years ago, that there is no such thing as new art'. It was Marcel Duchamp who made a four-word speech at a Tate dinner, circa 1965: 'Beware of fresh art'. (The influential New York critic Clement Greenberg was currently insisting that new art should look `fresh'.) With his rotting carcases he may seem to have taken this Duchamp dig at Greenberg a little too literally but now that it's known he possesses drawing skills Damien Hirst remains a case in Sickert's point.
From the Cradle to the Grave: Selected Drawings is at the International Centre of Graphic Art, Ljubljana until 28 September.
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