Tuesday Reads: Damien Hirst
Catching light at home in dark times © Vivian Rutsch
“And it all stems from the question, “What would happen if...what if…”. I mean, why not? At some point I told myself, “If someone tells me something, instead of taking it for granted I’ll ask “Why?’” Unfortunately, then you find out there is no fucking why. Then you find yourself in the uncomfortable position of being responsible for your own discoveries, while everyone who initially thought you were an asshole says, “Wooonderful, my deeear!’”.”
Contemporary art often feels unapproachable from the outside. Why? Mainly because it relies on an impulse we are taught to hinder as we turn from childhood to adulthood: the unrelenting and quirky habit to consistently wonder why. Artists (photographers included) feed off critical observation. The first reaction to their witnessing something new generally falls somewhere between bewilderment and a sense that it does not make sense. Artists tend to interact with the whole world around them as they would with a Where’s Waldo game, always looking for that unnoticeable detail that feels oddly out of place and enquiring what would happen if…
© Amani Willett
The outcome is an ability to digest our reality and translate it in a different form, a form that while being composed by those same initial elements, still feels odd. Take a Hirst work of art such as The physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (editor’s note: the tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde). It objectively looks just like a shark immersed in water, basically an abstraction or a minimal version of any aquarium of the world. Still, our instinct immediately perceives that something is off.
Is it the fact that the tank is way too small for the shark? Is it the fact that the shark is non-flapping rather than flapping–for those who are more familiar with Quentin Tarantino rather than with British Young Artists, Bill in the movie Kill Bill perfectly describes this notion of life and death–as one would expect it to be? Is it the unmistakably straightforward title of the work? Whatever the reason, any spectator finds herself somehow seeing a shark for the first time, and not only that. She somehow sees death for the first time as well. And it painstakingly beautiful, and it is acceptable– even more than life itself seems to be–in that very moment. So out of place, yet completely natural. And that is precisely what one feels in front of great photography as well. No great inventions, most of the time. After all, photography reproduces our reality in small portions.
© Artem Tulchynskyi
However, the photographs that fall in the realm of fine-art, the photographs we observe in most museums and the photographs that cause many observers to mutter “What makes it so special so as to hang in a museum? My son could have taken it…” all share a peculiar and well defined feature: a quirky eye for what feels odd to everyone, yet somehow impalpable, and the ability to frame it in a way that makes it naturally part of the scene. Then, and only then, it becomes odd to everyone’s eye. It is precisely the act of asking why and turning the odd into part of a normality that brings absurdity to the light. Thus, the process of art-making reveals itself as a quite arbitrary process of following one’s fascination for a slight feeling of unease, and the curiosity to pursue the question “What is causing it?”. Most often, the quest for an answer leads to the isolation and normalisation of aspects that caused discomfort to everyone else in the room. However, while the priority of non-artists is to act in the setting of reality, the priority of the artist is to intervene on that setting and modify its characterising features. And art is the outcome. Woooonderful, my deeear!
