Hirst and last

Senior Features Writer

Friday 25 May 2012

In the end almost all of Damien Hirst's art deals with endings.

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A Damien Hirst retrospective gives the impression his best work is behind him, finds Teddy Jamieson

Mortality and our efforts to delay or circumvent it are the alpha and omega of his work. It's such a familiar idea now that it barely needs said. We have all seen – or more likely seen pictures of – his dead sharks, suspended sheep, motionless shoals of glassy-eyed fish, bisected cows, hacked-off cows' heads, zapped flies, stubbed out cigarettes, and half-flensed giant bodies, their plastic body parts shining lifelessly. And then there is his famous memento mori, that diamond-encrusted skull. The message couldn't be clearer. We are dying. We are all dying. We will soon be dead. Death is coming. Death is always coming. Death is here. Death is everywhere.

It's certainly everywhere here. Near the end of the current Damien Hirst retrospective in Tate Modern, you are confronted with a huge black disc. Entitled Black Sun, it's a glowering void of a thing that sucks the light in. As you get closer you can see that it's surface is raised, a rough disc covered in bumps and pops that, as you get up close, just about reveal themselves as the carcasses of flies; a huge, beautiful, baleful circle of dead things.It is a rare highlight as we get towards the end of the exhibition. Because if there's another death on display here it may well be the death of the muse. This is a miserable thing to say if for you, like me, the idea of Damien Hirst has been one of the most exciting in modern art over the last decade and a half. But faced with a rigorous and handsomely mounted edit of his best work (no paintings other than spot paintings) it's hard to avoid seeing a kind of dying fall in his work the closer you get to the present.There are other problems too. In particular the repetitiveness of his work. It's as if there's some kind of mad completist in Hirst that means one is never enough when you can have five, six, seven, or 50. All those spot paintings, all those spin paintings, all those medicine cabinets, all those surgical instruments. Who knew that implements designed to cut and carve up the body could look so ... boring?But it's the penultimate room where things go seriously pear-shaped. Here are stained-glass style windows made up of repeating butterfly patterns. Here is a marble figure, Anatomy Of An Angel, half stripped naked and half stripped of her skin. Here are works of art, in short, that wouldn't look out of place on a Hipgnosis album cover. Or maybe that's unfair. Hipgnosis isn't that bad.The frustration in all this is that it rather undermines Hirst's claims as an artist. Because for a while this retrospective reminds us why he made an impact in the first place. Once you're through the first room which is home to his nascent efforts, including a rather charmingly wonky spot painting (the very first, in fact) the exhibition catches fire. Literally, in the case of A Thousand Years, a cruel, brilliant piece that is full of echoes of the work of everyone from Francis Bacon to Bruce Nauman, but remains wholly, seriously Hirstian. Behind a huge glass and steel vitrine, maggots turn into flies which in turn fly through to feed on the flesh and blood of a severed cow's head and, if they're unlucky, fly into an insect-o-cutor to fry and burn and then fall into a suspended tray below in which fly carcasses gather and coagulate. It is a work that is minimalist in tone, concise in effect and chilling in its perfection. When he did it, did the artist realise he'd done his best work?It's a piece that has retained its power in a way that the famous shark – aka The Physical Impossibility Of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living (Hirst is great at titles) – has not. That's partly because of its over-familiarity but also because the current shark looks rather pathetic, a pitted and pocked old handbag of a thing, the cavernous mouth as threatening as a zip.Other seminal works fare better. Mother And Child, the bisected cow and her bisected calf, is achingly sad and powerful, an interior view that reveals the complexity and abstract beauty of meat and muscle and bone (it's a lovely affirmation of vegetarianism too, but I may be projecting onto it my own beliefs there).Beauty is not a word used often about Hirst. He's too nailed to the idea of sensation for it to register enough. But it's there. In Lullaby, The Seasons (2002), pill upon pill of every colour and shape sit on tiny silver ledges in a mirrored cabinet, a pharmaceutical vision that's picture perfect and chillingly antiseptic. The problem is that you then turn and see another medicine cabinet. And then another. And the charge of the original dissipates.And that's the problem with Damien. The charge has dissipated. He is a victim of entropy, a winding down of energy. He goes on dreaming up ideas that have none of the impact of what has gone before. Even the diamond skull seems like little more than a gaudy decoration. It should mean more, but there is no room in it for metaphor or abstraction. It is what it is. A skull coloured with diamonds, one that might work as a decoration for a Thomas Sabo jewellery shop window.That's a harsh judgement on Hirst at his best but then Hirst hasn't been at his best for some time now. The best of him is already some distance in the past and travelling further and further into the dark. It's fading. Fading away, fading to black. Damien Hirst continues at Tate Modern until September 9.

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