Hirst's new works will be familiar to many, but can something be original even when it is not new?
Damien Hirst has been teasing a new series of paintings on his Instagram account for the last year. The paintings, black and white depictions of stormy oceans, are being covered in splashes of oil paint. Hirst has even shared a video of himself developing the works – dipping a long-armed brush in a small tub of viscous oil paint and then flinging it at the paintings, which have been arranged two or three high on the walls of his expansive UK studio. It is as much a performative act as a work of fine art.
The haters of Hirst, of which he has many (although this seems to have been decreasing over the years – Hirst himself may be the poster-child of how to show authenticity and personality through social media use) will say things like "I bet Hirst didn't paint these works himself" (obviously he didn't, nor does he hide this fact) and "This has been done before".
I mean, intrinsically yes, these works are derivative in the arc of art history. There is a long list of artists known for throwing / splashing / dripping paint onto canvas. Jackson Pollock is, of course, the first who comes to mind, credited with pioneering 'action painting' in the 1940s – where works were made as a direct response to the free moving actions of the painter, as opposed to the careful and considered brushstrokes of the earlier generations (although history shows that painters earlier than Pollock were experimenting with the technique, such as the Ukrainian Janet Sobel).
Performing such action painting onto painted canvases, especially detailed, photorealistic ones, is a different oeuvre. Looking carefully at the videos that Hirst is teasing, it can be assumed that the photorealistic canvases on which he is flinging the paint have been painstakingly rendered by his assistants. Hirst is known for having a studio of talented painters who can make such photorealistic works for him (he calls them 'Fact Paintings', and last year Gagosian even had a show dedicated entirely to them).
But even this idea isn't new. In 2009, another British artist, Marc Quinn, debuted a series of paintings called 'History Paintings', where he copied images from the media into sculpture and oil paint. In 2011, Quinn started flinging paint at the finished photorealistic canvases. According to Quinn, the juxtaposition between the meticulous and time-consuming oil painting, and the quick and raw gestural overpainting, represents the interplay between chaos and order that the subjects of the paintings embody. Over the years, Quinn has produced versions where he prints the background image on canvas using a large-scale industrial printer (instead of carefully oil painting the background). Here, the process then stems to reinforce the temporary, disposable nature of current news.
So it appears that Hirst is repeating what Quinn has done almost a decade prior. However, in contrast to Quinn's work, these canvases from Hirst lack any narrative as to why the paint splattered on top is necessary – it seems to be, ultimately, an aesthetic choice ('to capture energy', as he describes on Instagram). Hirst also seems to just be a fan of throwing paint at things, given all of his last works produced by hand are just paint thrown or dabbed on canvases (think of the cherry blossom paintings shown at the Fondation Cartier in mid-2021).
Despite all of this, I argue that the works are fundamentally original – yes, as original as a Pollock, Picasso or Pissarro. Why? Because they are huge, both in terms of the size of the canvas and/or the number of works produced in the series. They use obscene (and expensive) amounts of oil paint and they are produced in a factory reminiscent of Warhol's. Hirst, through more than three decades of art market dominance, has acquired unbelievable wealth (easily more than one billion pounds). He is now at the liberty of deploying this capital in any way he wants, and, luckily for us, he wants to use some of that money to make art. For example, allegedly his 2017 exhibition, "Treasures From the Wreck of the Unbelievable", cost more than $65 million to produce.
Hirst has decided to focus on creating immaculate photorealistic canvases and then throwing oil paint at them. In the video there are tens of them on the walls of his studio. It seems likely that, whatever exhibition they end up in, it will be overwhelming in scale, much like the Fondation Cartier show. We need to be mature enough to recognise that originality can exist not merely in what is done, but how it is done, including if that how simply means to do things bigger and more expensively than anyone has done previously.
I remind you of the adage, "Modern art = I could have done that + Yeah, but you didn't". I think we can add in 'Yeah, but you couldn't'. George