Damien Hirst, Cathedrals Built on Sand @ Gagosian

 

Damien Hirst, Cathedrals Built on Sand
Installation View @ Gagosian

Popular wisdom would have us believe that Damien Hirst is all sparkle and no substance. It's just visual candy, as one critic put it in 1993 when Hirst burst onto the contemporary art scene. Critics love to tell us that his work is superficial, mass cultural trash. I have never understood this estimation, and always wonder if these same critics have ever been face to face with these conceptually complex and aesthetically gorgeous art works? If ever anyone was in any doubt about the value of Hirst's sculpture, the current exhibition at Gagosian's rue de Ponthieu gallery will surely convince that this is contemporary art at its most sophisticated.

Damien Hirst, Cathedrals Built on Sand
Installation View @ Gagosian

The exhibition features pill cabinets made between 1996 and 2021. Row upon row of candy coloured pills—it's that candy reference yet again—in cabinets with mirrored backs and locked sliding glass cases. As if these objects were precious paintings, they are perfectly framed in shiny, mirrored aluminium. From the start, I couldn't decide if I was being plunged into the pill aisle at Rite Aid or a gallery filled with priceless art works. The mirrored display cabinets, lighting, reflections and all those candy-look alike pills can be found in both contexts. The cabinets also seem to be indicating that as the ultimate consumers, there is nothing more tempting than our own image. We watch ourselves in the mirrored backings, however, our faces and features are blurred. Our figures studded with pills and our vision is made foggy, as if we are under the influence of a mixture of pills.

The pills themselves are mesmerising. We move up close to study them on their shelves, and our perception shifts from looking at an art work to studying pills (many of which are fabricated in Hirst's studio). Then, as we start to recognize some and wonder about others, our salivary glands are activated. They look so delicious that we want to pop them into our mouths, and enjoy their flavour. This is, of course, the problem. The works discourse on the pharmaceutical industry, our dependence on pills, the ease of access, that feeling of gratification when swallowed. All of these thoughts are aroused by looking at the pills on their shelves. And because the lighting is designed to arouse our desire to buy, the works are as much about shopping as they are about popping pills. The title of the exhibition reminds us of the impossibility of filling the emptiness of these desires. Our hope and hunger to escape through pills is sure to remain unsatiated when consuming from these Cathedrals Built on Sand.

Damien Hirst, When the Heart Speaks, 2005

As is the case with Hirst's animals in formaldehyde, the pills on shelves in glass cabinets explore notions of aesthetics. As much as the works are about the pharmaceutical industry, our insatiable desire to be fixed with a pill, they are also about the art industry. The sparkling frame and shining object on the gallery wall makes them gorgeous to look at. They are precisely the eye candy that Hirst has been accused of producing. But they are much more. The cabinets are aesthetically pleasing, addressing us on an intellectual, visual, emotional and physical level as we are pulled towards and away from them, drawn into their spell, to wonder at the meticulous detail of their making and as we try to get a better glimpse of ourselves. Each work asks something different of the viewer: some create intense confusion as we are tempted to find patterns in the layout of the pills on their shelves. Others are best viewed from a distance, like cabinets of curiosity filled with once living beings now dead and stuffed.

The cabinets also engage the ongoing tensions between industrialization of art and culture as opposed to the hand made art work. The stainless steel cabinets are industrially produced, and of course, the pills are supposed to be industrially produced. But many of them are made individually by hand in Hirst's studio - itself a form of the manufacture of art.

Damien Hirst, Cathedrals Built on Sand
Installation View @ Gagosian

In one of the lovely surprises in the show, as we walk around the corner into the office space, we are met by small blue and pink cabinets at eye level. Both are filled with viagra; a blue case for the male, pink for the women. Gender is not usually found in the medicine cabinet, but when it comes to viagra, Hirst makes a his and hers display. When we get upstairs and see the reiteration of the blue and pink cabinets we start to smirk. The perfect blue and pink cabinets downstairs are a reinforcement of the gendering of illness and virility, but upstairs, after several repetitions, we start to realize the hyper articulation of gender in the medicine cabinet. Does anyone really believe in the blue = male and pink = female categorizations today? That said, our response is not straightforward. As we are pulled up very close to the pink and blue cabinets to examine the pills inside we are looking at something quite different from the others. Lo and behold, who has manufactured the pills? Pfizer, the manufacturer's name on everyone's lips in our age. And so, the cultural criticism digs deeper. The same manufacturer saving us all from death and eventual extinction by the virus has organized virility along clear-cut gender lines that are easily coded in blue and pink boxes.  

Pinault Collection @ Bourse de Commerce

Urs Fischer, Untitled, 2011

I had seen plans and 3D models of the renovations to the Bourse de Commerce, but nothing prepared me for Tadao Ando's magnificent refurbishment of what was built as a wheat exchange. On entry to the museum, it's impossible to resist the structure's pull to stand under the dome. While the evening sun shone through the lattice iron work of the cupola, some visitors stood unsure of how they were meant to respond. The natural inclination is to look upwards, where we see the original frescoes celebrating the history of trade between the continents. Needless to say, the frescos tell a story of colonialism, racism, and oppression. This history stays with us as we wander through the circular building. It is impossible to forget the history into which we have stepped. 

Marlene Dumas, Mamma Roma, 2012

François Pinault is known for his eye for contemporary art that challenges its world. Thus, it is no surprise to see that all of the works on display in these inaugural exhibitions are concerned to challenge the purveyors of power. Whether it be the excoriating portraits of Marlene Dumas and her fellow South Africans, such as Kerry James Marshall, or Ryan Gander's mouse appearing to have eaten its way through the wall by the elevator, the works are constantly challenging all that their surroundings. Dumas's depictions of violated sexuality, racial injustice, and brutality of the powerful over the powerless scream at us from their walls. There is no mistaking what these exhibitions want to convey. The building may have been constructed at the intersection of industrial modernity and colonial power, but art of the centuries since has unravelled the legitimacy of this power.

Rudolf Stingel, Untitled (Paula), 2012

From the very first steps inside the museum, the challenge to power is not simply represented, but felt. Urs Fischer's irreverence sets the tone. His central installation is both monumental and searing in its critique of the monumentalism of art, commerce and white male sexuality—effectively everything that the history of the Bourse de Commerce encapsulates. As we contemplate the installation, we realize that Fischer and his friend Rudolf Stingel are concerned to undo the narrative of power that we look up to. Beneath the grand narrative of colonization and the triumph of French nationalism of the ceiling frescoes, Fischer has placed a wax sculpture of Giambologna's Abduction of the Sabine Woman (1579-1583). The original sculpture, on view in the Loggia in Florence, shows a woman desperately struggling to free herself from her male captors. Demonstrating an irreverence and dismissal of its history, Fischer's work is a candle that will burn for six months. Already, when I visited one month after opening, the captor's head was in a state of disintegration. Surrounding Fischer's statue, his Stingel has installed wax—also in the process of melting—chairs of all kinds from around the world. Board room chairs, airplane seats, indigenous seats. Thus, the artists transform monuments into ephemeral objects that, ultimately, cannot be looked up at or down on. They are in the process of disappearing.

Reflections of the late afternoon sun

Speaking of chairs, Tatiana Trouvé's eight chairs, The Guardian dotted throughout the museum are one of the delights of the permanent exhibition. The chairs cast in bronze, copper and filled with the bags, shoes, pillows and books in marble and onyx are all at once curious, inspiring, sensuous and sad. It is as though the owner of the objects under, next to, or on the chairs has just stepped away and will be back any moment. Trouvé's use of materials against themselves—marble that looks as soft and comfy as the pillow it represents, books made of onyx that we feel the urge to turn the pages—creates an impossibility. The impossibility of the materials and the absent owners come together in intriguing, playful sculptures that somehow distract us from the paintings in the room. The chairs are also indicative of the frequent shifts of attention that we experience as we wander—iron lattice reflections on the cupola's frieze, a double staircase for operation of the wheat exchange, a medici column, and arched passageways. Trouvé's chairs tell of yet another history having taken place in the building. 

Tatiana Trouvé, The Guardian, 2018

There are so many wonderful works on display that it's difficult to pick a favourite, but I was delighted to see Louise Lawler's installation, The Helms Amendment series (1989). The 94 black and white photographs of a plastic cup, each given a supporting senator's name and state —red for Democrats and blue for Republicans. Among other things, I didn't know that the Democrat/blue and Republican/red colour coding for American political parties wasn't introduced until 2000. The photographic series was Lawler's response to the US Senate vote in favour of an amendment to government spending, which in 1987 saw the refusal of funding for AIDS education, information and prevention materials, under the pretext that it encouraged homosexuality. Most powerfully, the six abstainers and naysayers do not get a cup in Lawler's series. A quotation from the amendment accompanies the naysayers names: "none of the funds made available under this Act to the Centers for Disease Control shall be used to provide AIDS eduction, information, or prevention materials and activities that promote or encourage, directly or indirectly, homosexual sexual activities."  

Louise Lawler, Helms Amendment, 1989, detail

The seemingly benign empty plastic cup, its reflection, and the black silence surrounding it incites viewers to reflect on the deep political divisions of our time. In addition, the fact that 94 of the senators voted to uphold the amendment surely prompts wonder and outrage at the ongoing violation of human rights and senseless discrimination of the political system. The work's eerie relevance in 2021 gives further cause to pause at the mechanisms and institutions of power and manipulation that are critiqued throughout this, Paris's newest museum. 

James Coleman

James Coleman, Slide Piece, 1972-1973

I have been reading about James Coleman's work for almost thirty years, but have seen very little of it in that time. The small, but superbly curated exhibition at the Pompidou is as challenging as it is welcome. Coleman's is a provocative body of work that has fascinated some of the most prominent figures in the worlds of experimental film, art and photography studies. And with good reason.

The work is challenging because it doesn't fit into the neatly arranged categories that we give art and visual culture today. Coleman's work characteristically occupies the interface between still and moving images. He also plays with the relations between photograph and cinema, art history and cinema, and more recently, the spectacular visual culture of advertising, television, fashion photography and police imaging. Known for his use of transparent images projected through multiple stacked slide carousels, sometimes accompanied by audio tracks that don't describe what's in the image, Coleman's signature works are also about the tension between image and word. We are sure to come away wondering about the efficacy of words and images as modes of communication.

James Coleman, Retake with Evidence, 2007

In one piece at the beginning, Harvey Keitel stands on a stage, intermittently backgrounded by a plain white stage, archaeological ruins, monumental columns, antique sculptures that might be in a museum. Keitel delivers a monologue from Sophocles that is about as impenetrable as the Greeks get. Keitel is not preened and prissed for the camera, but wears a sweatshirt and perspires under the lights. Sophocles text is focussed on questions of social violence and democracy, but it's the contexts and modes of presentation that draw our focus. Issues of performance, staging, frustration of viewer expectations through fragmentation and repetition are brought to the fore. Even if they don't watch the entire performance, viewers will understand they are watching their own process of watching. 

James Coleman, La Tache Aveugle, 1978-1990

Also towards the beginning is a signature Coleman slide projection with synchronised audio, Slide Piece. The voice describes the most important aspects of the image before us: a drab, nondescript square in Milan. Each time the slides move past the light source, a new description begins. But the image is the same, even if it is a new slide. And the audio simply describes different aspects of this same drab square, honing in on what might be important to different viewers. Over time, our eyes will have moved around the image having noticed a window above the awning, the pylon behind the cars, and other innocuous details. The work gives the idea that what is in the image depends on who is looking, and what's important to that viewer. 

James Coleman, Charon (MIT Project), 1989

In other works, such as Charon, the slides are self-conscious performances of the way that moving images are constructed. Even if the images are not moving. Thus in Charon, a synchronised audio tells stories about the people who are in the image, but again, the slides don't fully correspond to the stories we hear. However, there are just enough details—the presence of a child, a hotel room, a window, a fancy outfit—to keep our desire for a sound/image link alive. Unlike the construction of narrative desire that promises an ending, here it is the promise of audio that goes with the image before us. Again, we are faced with images about the frustrations of viewing the moving image, even if we look at still images. Likewise, a piece such as Charon thrusts the difficulty of an image's communication into the foreground. We are made aware of all the elements that aid (and ultimately manipulate) our understanding and consequent interpretation. We start to become cognisant of the influence of things like the title, the descriptions, the uses to which the image is put, who takes the photographs, who directs the set, who dresses the models. 

James Coleman, (Documenta 11 Project), 2002

In a work such as (Documenta 11 Project), Coleman removes the title altogether. Thus, we are left looking at some kind of transient shape in the light that is presumably moving slower than the human eye can perceive it. And we have no idea of what we are looking at because he has removed the title. That said, the work has a title, even if it has been untitled: it is given (Documenta 11 Project) as title.  The work was commissioned for Documenta 11 by Okwui Enwezor in 2002, a Documenta that had its unique identity. Coleman's work in turn takes on that identity. In other words, we are never left to fall into the illusion of the works.

James Coleman, Still Life, 2013-2016

Even when illusion motivates the representation, we are confronted with the exposure of inauthenticity. In Still Life, Coleman plays with the French translation of dead nature. The poppy has been pulled out of the ground, thus destroyed, and is re-animated by Coleman's camera when the flower makes minuscule movements. The piece is projected on the black wall without a sound. Given the looping of audio tracks in other works, the silence of Still Life is itself somehow frustrating. So used to playing games with the audio/image relations, it's difficult to stand still and watch the flower which may or may not be real, in absolute silence. 

James Coleman, Lapsus Exposure, 1992-1994

Ultimately, this exhibition requires a lot of energy, but it is richly rewarding. Time spent with each work is revealing of our expectations of images, and the relations we take for granted. The bonus reward comes when we stand for long enough and find that we are watching ourselves watching, or at least, we are confronted with the processes with which we engage and the expectations we bring to looking at still and moving images.

All Images courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery © James Coleman