Damien Hirst / Aleksandra Hirszfeld
Cinderella
A couple of days ago I received a discreet, yet urgent invitation to Studio Gallery.
Having passed a thick black pall curtain, I stood surprised in the middle of a very trendy crowd. I was faced eye to eye with no more and no less but the recently deceased Mr. Damien Hirst himself. He was just standing there, although ?floating? might be a better term. In the centre of the room smelling slightly of formaldehyde (or whatever it is taxidermists use). Indeed, he was there, I witnessed it with my own eyes. Pickled, just like his shark. The great shark of British art.
We have heard about this sort of thing before. The eccentric British gentleman, who donates his body to an academy on the condition that it will be mummified. The mummies in Southern Italy, standing in graveyards, dried by the wind. Baroque reliquaries, inside which the remains of saints are held, thanks to the art of taxidermy and frivolous sculpting.
A few moments later I was sipping my wine, sharing the crowd?s strategy, seemingly the only one possible - to look without noticing, smiling politely. Meanwhile, my brain was undergoing peregrinations through conceptual hell.
He was standing there in golden boots. Golden Wellies. Both erotic fetish and aristocratic memory of victory.
Dressing him this way, Aleksandra Hirszfeld is performing an usurpation. She steps in someone else?s shoes. Like Cinderella’s sisters, to see if the glory of someone else with suit her. By imitating his strategy (the baroque pickling) she is trying to fill in for him in the art market. To take his privileged position there. Also to show how uncertain scheming like this is. The price tag in his hands is like a family jewel.
It is nothing other than repetition. Art, however, does not fall into such categories as originality in the same way as fashion or advertising.
With golden boots Hiszfeld turns Hirst into something like Danton’s head from Roussel’s Locus Solus. A network of nerves floating in “soave”, silently mouthing its own orations. Endlessly stimulated by a hairless cat. Death is unimaginable to any living creature. This is just a puppet is reduced to its own brand.
In the last scene of Satyricon we witness a reading of the will. Eumolpos, the poet, leaves all his fortune to those who will eat his body, since they devoured his soul while he was still alive. The said fortune is a lie. It exists only in the trusting minds of the alleged beneficiaries.
I fear that pickled Hirst might encounter the same problem as his shark. It turned out that the formalin solution was too weak, and the noble beast?s carcass began to rot. So they had to exchange it.
Studio Gallery, Hirst in golden boots, Aleksandra Hirszfeld, 10 april 2010
english