by Greg Johnson
Away from the Flock consists of a dead lamb in formaldehyde, its title pointing towards religious symbolism. The lamb might have a personal resonance for Hirst, who is a former Catholic. It is also suggestive of pastoral art, but problematically so.
With all of these works, we are invited to view death behind glass. Glass works to reveal what is behind it, but it also acts as a barrier, and in this respect Hirst shares some of Francis Bacon’s ambivalence towards the art object. The framing device simultaneously acts as a window on the object, thus revealing it as though without mediation, and it also works to delineate the art object as a special category requiring a predisposed form of observation. Furthermore, considering the way in which Hirst frames his dead creatures so as to present a cold, taxonomic portrait of mortality, is it overstating things to suggest that these works were a sort of proto-critique of Internet culture, wherein all of life is presented vicariously and pseudo-objectively on a screen?
Also of interest is a series of display cabinet works. One series of these works is the medicine cabinets, which are literally medicine cabinets filled with packs and bottles of pharmaceuticals. These works hint at the medicalized approach to life that has eclipsed the religious. Hirst presents these drugs as though they were icons, and the clinical appearance of the medicine cabinets reminds us that an age of reason provides clarity rather than faith. But the exchange is problematic. Whereas religion offered the certainty of immortality, medicine now offers the possibility of increased longevity; a humbling trade-off. We believe in these drugs as a new form of Eucharistic sacrament and we swallow them whole, hoping that they will defer our meeting with our maker. As Hirst puts it, “in the world today everybody dies of cancer, if you avoid all the potholes that life throws up. And in a way God has become cancer or it starts to feel like that. . . . If God is to be found anywhere today why not there?”292
Another strand of the display cabinet pieces variously features shells, fish, diamonds, and cigarette butts. All in different ways point towards death, but also suggest more of the museum curator approach rather than that of the fine artist, and Hirst has noted that he would prefer art galleries to be more like the Natural History Museum.293 With these pieces there is a sense of the Victorian collector, of the self-confident taxonomist, who can discover the pre-existing order in the world; who can map out God’s plan.
Isolated Elements Swimming in the Same Direction for the Purpose of Understanding consists of a pair of display cabinets featuring an array of fish species. In the one cabinet the fish swim left, in the other, right. The only things that distinguish this work from an actual natural history display are the title and the fact that the fish are facing in different directions, which invites some degree of interpretation. The fish can’t make up their minds whether they are objective scientific artifacts or higher-level artistic creations, so they swim in both directions at the same time, like Hirst.
These works potentially violate one of the laws of conceptualism: that reality does not consist of pre-existing categories of value and hierarchy. Hirst seems to enjoy the sense of taxonomy in these works rather than trying to subvert it.
More recently, in the first decade of the 21st century, Hirst executed a series of biopsy paintings. Each was a large scale work based on medical photographs of diseased cells. Each piece was titled after the original photograph’s digital name, again combining his obsessions with classification and death.
The pieces are enlarged to a huge size so that the individual cells become monstrously large. Yet, at the same time, the bright coloration of these microscopic images gives them a vivid appeal, creating a sense of a psychedelic interior cosmos. When viewed closely, the pictures reveal razor blades, hooks, and other objects which have been attached to the high-resolution images. It is as though Hirst is captivated by the power of medical imaging to capture these extraordinary images of disease, but he cannot allow the neutral gaze of the scientist to be dominant. The addition of various blades and other loaded imagery channels the viewer’s interpretation so that the aesthetically pleasant pictures are ruptured with a violent realization of their malignant intent; but more importantly, we are compelled to notice the metaphysical twist that the artist has added to these artifacts of the physical sciences. The omniscient eye of medicine is able to chart our bodies down to the cellular level, and with this information, forestall death. But it cannot defer death forever, and because death remains an inevitability, it remains for Hirst-as-artist-as-priest to provide a stark exegesis of the terminal condition.
BEYOND POSTMODERNISM: HIRST AS METAPHYSICAL ARTIST
It is this attempt to smuggle metaphysical ideas into the discourse of postmodernism that marks Hirst’s work as significant and that distinguishes him from most of his contemporaries. It is a radical strategy for two reasons.
Firstly, because postmodernism does not allow for sincere, authentic expressions of feeling but instead insists upon a screen of irony or cynical detachment through which experience must be filtered, the presentation of ideas concerning death and its meaning disrupts the ruthlessly curated scope of contemporary discussion and posits an emotionally resonant subject matter at the heart of the work.
Secondly, the ontological status of the art object had previously been leveled by conceptualism in order to erase the hierarchical nature of Western culture. By utilizing the art object to evoke a contemplation of death, Hirst necessarily (even if perhaps inadvertently) points to an ultimate boundary, a locus of fundamental meaning. This reintroduces the concepts of hierarchy and value into contemporary art. Thus Hirst’s oeuvre has the effect of bringing sincerity and hierarchy back into the Western art tradition, whether or not this is his actual intention.
This aspect of Hirst’s work has been noted and is a cause for deep suspicion by some critics, particularly American ones who seek to uphold the theoretical foundations of conceptualism. According to this analysis, Hirst’s work suffers from the allures of populism so that it conspires with a pre-existing system of signifiers to elaborate what are seen as mystical gestures. The aim of contemporary art, so the critique goes, is to draw attention to the existence of this network of signifiers and to undermine the hidden ideological assumptions that support it. In this way, the artist can subvert oppressive power structures, even if doing so means the artwork’s complicity in its own commodification. This perspective has been articulated by one critic, who writes that Hirst’s work “consisted of a diluted variant of 1980s appropriation art. Anglicised and ontologised into aura-laden tableaux that dealt, not with the seriality or sign-value of the commodity, but with the timeless universals of the ‘human condition’. The regressive, conservative nature of his art was masked, however, by the coolness and slickness of its presentation, and by his own self-promotion.”294
In this sense, Hirst’s work cannot easily be assimilated by the art world over which he reigns. It is only because the art world is concerned with fashion and celebrity, rather than with meaning, that the implications of Hirst’s work are not pursued. Hirst is fully aware of this, stating, “I’ve said you have to get people listening to you before you can change their minds. . . You’ve got to become a celebrity before you can undermine it, and take it apart, and show people there’s no difference between celebrities and real life.”295 His work is replete with the ambiguity of this position to the point of bi-polarity. If he is, as he suggests, engaging in a Faustian pact with celebrity culture, it is important to note that many of the ideas he brings to the table are frankly archaic in the best possible sense.
Is Damien Hirst a great artist? Before answering this question, it would be worth remembering Coomaraswamy’s potent maxim: “The artist is not a special kind of man, every man is a special kind of artist.” Hirst is certainly not a great artist in the sense in which we understand Renaissance art to be great. He is instead a clever taxidermist, one full of ideas and obsessed with death. But this is not a demeaning judgment; he has a clear vision, and he pursues it rigorously. At th
e present time, it is difficult to see beyond the post-modern assumptions that impel the movement of conceptual art, including the notion that the artist is a special mediator who acts as a secular priest. But Hirst’s tableaux do raise the interesting notion that these very assumptions can return to notions of classification, hierarchical order, death, and speculations concerning what might lie beyond it. When all things are rendered possible, it should be unsurprising if reality makes a reappearance.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
May 28, 2014
A HEROIC VISION FOR OUR TIME:
THE LIFE & IDEAS OF COLIN WILSON
JOHN B. MORGAN
Colin Wilson, the English author of well over a hundred books on subjects as diverse as philosophy, literary criticism, criminology, and the occult, as well as many novels, essays, and short stories, passed away on December 5, 2013 at 11:45 p.m. local time, in the presence of his wife Joy and his daughter Sally. He was 82. It was an unfortunate historical coincidence that Wilson’s death came within hours of Nelson Mandela’s, as it ended what little chance it had of being reported in the British television news media, as would have been fitting for an author who I believe to have been among the most important thinkers of the latter half of the twentieth century.
Wilson’s name is undoubtedly not familiar to many younger readers in the United States, unless they have eclectic reading tastes. Even in his native England, Wilson isn’t very well-known among the younger generations apart from his popular true crime and occult-themed books, which is a pity, since his work encompassed much more than that. Indeed, his first book, The Outsider,296 which has been variously classified as a work of existentialism, sociology, or literary criticism, was published in 1956, when Wilson was only 24, and became an instant bestseller throughout the English-speaking world, and was briefly the talk of the literary world. Few would have imagined at that time, I suspect, that he would end up passing into obscurity. It is certainly unjust that his exit from this world should have been upstaged by Mandela’s, since Wilson was certainly the more important of the two men when viewed from the perspective of human development.
I am probably biased in making this judgment, since Wilson was a personal acquaintance of mine. I remember first coming across a reprint of his book, Beyond the Outsider,297 on the remainder table outside of the downtown Ann Arbor Borders during a period when I had dropped out of my classes at the University of Michigan out of despair and frustration. Wilson’s writing opened up a whole new intellectual vista for me. Unlike much of what went on in my university classes, his ideas really struck a chord with me. This was no dry intellectualism or critique of the guilt of the modern West, and still less a “deconstruction”—this was an affirmation of the overflowing meaningfulness of life, and a philosophy of and call to unabashed and unapologetic heroism, based upon the best (and now discredited by the mainstream) aspects of the Western tradition. It was, in part, my enthusiasm for Wilson’s work that led me to finally return to and finish school.
I was also inspired to set up the first Website dedicated to Wilson in 1996, which soon led to me getting in touch with the man himself. We corresponded for many years, and I was fortunate enough to meet him at a conference of the International Fortean Organization in College Park, Maryland in November 2000, where he was a speaker. I can’t claim that Wilson was a close friend of mine, but he was certainly an acquaintance, and served as a great inspiration to me during a crucial time of my life.
WILSON’S LIFE
Colin wrote two autobiographies: the first, Voyage to a Beginning,298 was published in 1969; and Dreaming to Some Purpose,299 in 2004. These are the best sources for learning about Colin’s life, but I will offer a few essentials.
Colin was born on June 26, 1931 in Leicester, England to a working-class family. He developed an early passion for reading and ideas, although his first mature love was science. He left school, as was normal for teenagers at that time who would not be attending university, and started working at age 16, taking a job as an assistant in a chemistry lab. He has described how his early enthusiasm for science quickly waned, as he discovered that it alone failed to answer many of the essential questions he had, such as the meaning of life and his own place in it. Gradually sinking into despair, he describes how he went to work one day with the intention of killing himself. Upon arriving, he took down a bottle of hydrochloric acid that he knew would kill him instantly. But once he opened it and was about to drink, he suddenly saw himself as two people. One was a depressed and confused teenager; the other was the man he realized he could become. It occurred to him, he later recounted, that it didn’t matter at all if the first killed himself; but if the first Colin Wilson died, he would be taking the other one with him, and that would be a tragedy. So he put the bottle back on the shelf and went about his work.
Colin soon discovered his new passions in literature, philosophy, and writing, which he threw himself into with feverish enthusiasm. Supporting himself through a series of low-paying jobs for the next several years, he began reading widely and gestating the ideas that would eventually become his first book, The Outsider.
It was in 1954 that Colin, frustrated at the amount of time and energy which he was spending just to make ends meet instead of reading and writing, gave up his flat and took up residence in a sleeping bag on Hampstead Heath, a park in London. He would spend his days in the Reading Room at the British Museum, studying and working on his first novel, Ritual in the Dark,300 as well as The Outsider. (He later confessed that, when it was particularly cold, he would sometimes spend the night at his then-girlfriend Joy’s place.)
It just so happened that the established novelist Angus Wilson was the superintendent of the Reading Room at the time, and he and Colin struck up a friendship. When Angus learned that Colin was working on a novel, Angus asked to see it, and was so impressed that he encouraged Colin to find a publisher for it. Thus emboldened, Colin decided to send the manuscript of The Outsider, which he had already completed, to the publisher Victor Gollancz, who soon agreed to publish it. And when the book was released in both the United Kingdom and the United States in May 1956, it became an instant bestseller, earning widespread praise even from established literary figures like Cyril Connolly, Philip Toynbee, and Edith Sitwell, all of whom assured their readers that Colin’s career was greatness in the making. For a 24-year-old author publishing his first book, it was unheard of. It was every young writer’s fantasy brought to life, and might have seemed almost too good to be true.
And it was.
Upon the publication of the second book in what came to be called Colin’s “Outsider Cycle,” Religion and the Rebel,301 in 1957, the critics who had previously been so full of praise had now turned vicious. It was obvious, many of them claimed, that they had been fooled—Wilson was nothing but a pretentious, egomaniacal hack who was attempting to grapple with issues that were beyond his knowledge and maturity. This established a standard viewpoint in the British press that persisted up to and including his obituaries, some of which were quite nasty. Either Colin Wilson was to be ridiculed, or ignored altogether.
There are many reasons for this. Jealousy was no doubt a factor. Another was that, upon the overnight success of The Outsider, the press had made Colin into a celebrity, and he, at age 24, was too naïve to realize how he was being used by them, as he himself later conceded. People quickly became sick of seeing Wilson’s name and picture in the newspapers and magazines (he even made the cover of Life). Another factor was an incident in early 1957 in which Joy’s father came across some notes that Colin had been making for a novel he was working on (which later became Ritual in the Dark), in which one of the characters is a sexual deviant. Thinking that these notes were Colin’s own beliefs, Joy’s father immediately went over to his apartment, bursting in on the couple while they were having dinner and crying, in a phrase that was soon to become infamous, “The game is up, Wilson!” and threatening to strike him with a horsewhip. As they stood in
the kitchen arguing, the police were called, and although the incident quickly came to an end, the reporters, tipped off by Colin and Joy’s own dinner guest, were already on their way and ready to pounce on this juicy bit of celebrity gossip. Soon the story about the young literary star getting his comeuppance was in every newspaper in Britain. The fate of Colin’s reputation was sealed.
It just so happened that the publication of The Outsider coincided with the premiere of 26-year-old John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger,302 which, although it failed to garner the critical acclaim of Colin’s book, became very popular with audiences, and was seen as a sign of the British Zeitgeist. As a result, the press decided to lump Wilson and Osborne together with several other writers, including Kingsley Amis, Alan Sillitoe, and others, and dubbed them the “angry young men.” Although their specific styles and ideas had little in common, these writers were young and discontented with the state of British society in the 1950s, and came from lower-class backgrounds. So, for better or worse, Colin had been appointed part of a literary movement.
Another of the angry young men was Bill Hopkins, a lifelong friend of Colin’s who in later years befriended Jonathan Bowden.303 Apart from philosophy and literature, Hopkins was also interested in far Right and fascistic ideas, and although he was soon to abandon his writing career in favor of becoming an art dealer, he did publish a single novel, The Divine and the Decay,304 a rather bleak story about the leader of an apparently fascistic political party who is spending time in the Channel Islands to provide an alibi for a political assassination that he has ordered. In a Foreword he wrote for the second edition of the book, Colin praised it for its transcendence of ordinary morality and its affirmation of “the absurd,” as understood by the existentialists, and placed Hopkins in the same category as the great anarchistic amoralists of previous eras who dared to challenge the status quo of their own times. He wrote: