The Objects/The Humans - Life And Death And Things.
http://www.vivianadruga.com
“The Violence of inanimate objects”[1], as Damien Hirst puts it, is what his art is all about. It is about the violence of an object, which has all the attributes of immortality while in contrast, the human doesn’t even approach it. It is about the violent idea that they, the objects, will exist forever while we will consume our limited existence contemplating their immortality.
Photo: Ciprian Muresan /Leap Into The Void After Three Seconds (Poster/2004)
We are living in an age of the pornography of the visible and everywhere we go in the city our visual sphere is assaulted by all sorts of images. There isn’t even a search engine invented to track image down on the Internet. This could only be possible if there was a text attached to it in order to identity it. That could mean that image is out of control and that it is so much image produced right now that it is impossible to cope with it. Steve Mann for example, a Canadian technician and artist, has invented a wearable computer, which he has been wearing for twenty years. This computer records everything he experiences and broadcasts it instantly on the Internet. What Steve Mann sees, the world sees in real time. Another use of the power of wearable computers is to filter out advertising and other elements of daily experience you don’t want to see and experience. What does this say about the world we are living in, in which humans turn themselves into objects? In which everything can be subject of your intervention and personal touch. Reality has become a term that remembers us that we are so far away from it. We are recreating reality constantly. We want to create our personal and subjective idea of reality. Linear history is not possible anymore.
Objects talk about humans. In becoming super clean, sterilized they show that we are decomposing. Sometimes the artists mythologize themselves by transforming their body into an art piece. We just have to think at Jeff Koons’ Out of Heaven, a series of photographs and Italian glass sculptures, where you see the actual coitus between him and Cicciolina, to realize that the artist has become the object of his art and to get a clear picture of the century of individuality and of self-eviscerating that the art world has become. “His body, airbrushed and gleaming seemed the ultimate readymade […] the works which he begun his career glistened as if they were still on display in the shop window. These ready-mades had an aura of desirable consumer objects. They were super-clean, like Space equipment or high-tech medical gear”[2].
The way artists deal with the idea of life, death and the transcendental is by creating something immortal that would transgress their existence. Our body is loosing its fleshy consistency as our experiences are constantly mediated. The mediated technology means actually the ubiquity of the self but also its fragmentation into a multitude of ‘selfs’, a process, which can only result into total disappearance of the real body. This evanescence of the body triggers its reinventing. This is what art does at the moment. “As experience is increasingly mediated and abstracted, the lived relation of the body to the phenomenological world is replaced by a nostalgic myth of contact and presence. Authentic experience becomes both elusive and allusive as it is placed beyond the horizon of present lived experience, the beyond in which the antique, the exotic, and other fictive domains are articulated. In the process of distancing, the memory of the body is replaced by the memory of the object, a memory standing outside the self and thus presenting both a surplus and a lack of significance”[3].
The Romanian artist Ciprian Muresan is continuing Klein’s Leap into the Void (showing the artist jumping off a wall with his arms stretched) with the photograph showing Ciprian Muresan lying on the pavement with his arms stretched. Images depicting different forms of death are so present in our existence and are so many that it’s impossible to be touched by each of them. Gordon Burn is underlying an important aspect, the fact that “the technological media which enormously reinforce and heighten the illusion that death happens only to others have put a distance between us and our dying”[4].
Damien Hirst is using as ready-mades medical equipment, all sorts of drugs in different shapes and colors (The Void, 2000), which can release humans from pain. He says in an interview: “ I like to create emotions scientifically”, like a doctor removing pain in a sterilized white hospital room using devices for lifting up pain or mediating a soft transition towards death. In Pharmacy, 1992, an installation showing the life-size recreation of a chemist’s shop functioned both as a restaurant and as a gallery. The restaurant Pharmacy gets dirty, has to be cleaned, is art within a real environment where it can be modified so it is alive whereas the gallery Pharmacy stays the same, untouched, unmodified so it is dead. But the fact that it is dead and unmodified makes it eternal whereas by contrast we are the ones who are decomposing.
For the work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), the real tiger shark bought by Hirst from Australia was replaced because it was not properly ‘marinated’ by an exact artificially created replica. Hirst says that, as a conceptual artist, he is using formaldehyde to preserve an artwork for posterity but what he is actually doing is preserve an idea. He had to replace the cow’s head with maggots on it in A thousand Years (1990) because it was rotting and stinking. “You’ve got to take the smell away in order to make people look at a […] horrible thing. So if you want to see your dad dead…”[5]
Of course, Hirst is also laughing the art market in the face when selling For the Love of God in August 2007 with earn £35,000,000, the equivalent of 100 million dollars, but if it didn’t cost that much would it be more interesting? If it would have been made out of a cheap plastic? Hirst is playing a lot with what art is. He is constantly using his example of ruining a sense of visual comfort you might be used to. The image of the platinum replica of a real skull adorned with diamonds is deconstructing the skull as a visual icon of death. These lines will make a clear idea of Hirst dichotomy about life, death, beauty and humor: “It boils down to death. I mean, we’re […] dying. It’s shameless. What […] are we doing, dying? It’s so delicious, it’s so beautiful, it’s so fabulous. I don’t have to buy a […] microscope to see how fabulous it is. The real gear, the stuff that we’re living in, rots. And things that rot are so […] colorful. It’s amazing on absolutely every level. And we’re dying. It doesn’t make sense. So everything’s about celebrating, and about living. It’s about living.”[1]
-- viviana druga.
[1] Gordon Burn, On the Way to Work, p. 13
[2] Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art. Who are the Style Police? Controversies and Contexts in Recent Art, p. 394.
[3] Tony Godfrey [citing Susan Steward, On Looking, 1993], Conceptual Art. Who are the Style Police? Controversies and Contexts in Recent Art, p. 395
[4] Gordon Burn, On the Way to Work, p. 12
[5] Gordon Burn, On the Way to Work, p. 180 (referring to Ron Mueck’s Dead Dad)
[6] [6] Gordon Burn, On the Way to Work, p. 79
“The Violence of inanimate objects”[1], as Damien Hirst puts it, is what his art is all about. It is about the violence of an object, which has all the attributes of immortality while in contrast, the human doesn’t even approach it. It is about the violent idea that they, the objects, will exist forever while we will consume our limited existence contemplating their immortality.
Photo: Ciprian Muresan /Leap Into The Void After Three Seconds (Poster/2004)
We are living in an age of the pornography of the visible and everywhere we go in the city our visual sphere is assaulted by all sorts of images. There isn’t even a search engine invented to track image down on the Internet. This could only be possible if there was a text attached to it in order to identity it. That could mean that image is out of control and that it is so much image produced right now that it is impossible to cope with it. Steve Mann for example, a Canadian technician and artist, has invented a wearable computer, which he has been wearing for twenty years. This computer records everything he experiences and broadcasts it instantly on the Internet. What Steve Mann sees, the world sees in real time. Another use of the power of wearable computers is to filter out advertising and other elements of daily experience you don’t want to see and experience. What does this say about the world we are living in, in which humans turn themselves into objects? In which everything can be subject of your intervention and personal touch. Reality has become a term that remembers us that we are so far away from it. We are recreating reality constantly. We want to create our personal and subjective idea of reality. Linear history is not possible anymore.
Objects talk about humans. In becoming super clean, sterilized they show that we are decomposing. Sometimes the artists mythologize themselves by transforming their body into an art piece. We just have to think at Jeff Koons’ Out of Heaven, a series of photographs and Italian glass sculptures, where you see the actual coitus between him and Cicciolina, to realize that the artist has become the object of his art and to get a clear picture of the century of individuality and of self-eviscerating that the art world has become. “His body, airbrushed and gleaming seemed the ultimate readymade […] the works which he begun his career glistened as if they were still on display in the shop window. These ready-mades had an aura of desirable consumer objects. They were super-clean, like Space equipment or high-tech medical gear”[2].
The way artists deal with the idea of life, death and the transcendental is by creating something immortal that would transgress their existence. Our body is loosing its fleshy consistency as our experiences are constantly mediated. The mediated technology means actually the ubiquity of the self but also its fragmentation into a multitude of ‘selfs’, a process, which can only result into total disappearance of the real body. This evanescence of the body triggers its reinventing. This is what art does at the moment. “As experience is increasingly mediated and abstracted, the lived relation of the body to the phenomenological world is replaced by a nostalgic myth of contact and presence. Authentic experience becomes both elusive and allusive as it is placed beyond the horizon of present lived experience, the beyond in which the antique, the exotic, and other fictive domains are articulated. In the process of distancing, the memory of the body is replaced by the memory of the object, a memory standing outside the self and thus presenting both a surplus and a lack of significance”[3].
The Romanian artist Ciprian Muresan is continuing Klein’s Leap into the Void (showing the artist jumping off a wall with his arms stretched) with the photograph showing Ciprian Muresan lying on the pavement with his arms stretched. Images depicting different forms of death are so present in our existence and are so many that it’s impossible to be touched by each of them. Gordon Burn is underlying an important aspect, the fact that “the technological media which enormously reinforce and heighten the illusion that death happens only to others have put a distance between us and our dying”[4].
Damien Hirst is using as ready-mades medical equipment, all sorts of drugs in different shapes and colors (The Void, 2000), which can release humans from pain. He says in an interview: “ I like to create emotions scientifically”, like a doctor removing pain in a sterilized white hospital room using devices for lifting up pain or mediating a soft transition towards death. In Pharmacy, 1992, an installation showing the life-size recreation of a chemist’s shop functioned both as a restaurant and as a gallery. The restaurant Pharmacy gets dirty, has to be cleaned, is art within a real environment where it can be modified so it is alive whereas the gallery Pharmacy stays the same, untouched, unmodified so it is dead. But the fact that it is dead and unmodified makes it eternal whereas by contrast we are the ones who are decomposing.
For the work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), the real tiger shark bought by Hirst from Australia was replaced because it was not properly ‘marinated’ by an exact artificially created replica. Hirst says that, as a conceptual artist, he is using formaldehyde to preserve an artwork for posterity but what he is actually doing is preserve an idea. He had to replace the cow’s head with maggots on it in A thousand Years (1990) because it was rotting and stinking. “You’ve got to take the smell away in order to make people look at a […] horrible thing. So if you want to see your dad dead…”[5]
Of course, Hirst is also laughing the art market in the face when selling For the Love of God in August 2007 with earn £35,000,000, the equivalent of 100 million dollars, but if it didn’t cost that much would it be more interesting? If it would have been made out of a cheap plastic? Hirst is playing a lot with what art is. He is constantly using his example of ruining a sense of visual comfort you might be used to. The image of the platinum replica of a real skull adorned with diamonds is deconstructing the skull as a visual icon of death. These lines will make a clear idea of Hirst dichotomy about life, death, beauty and humor: “It boils down to death. I mean, we’re […] dying. It’s shameless. What […] are we doing, dying? It’s so delicious, it’s so beautiful, it’s so fabulous. I don’t have to buy a […] microscope to see how fabulous it is. The real gear, the stuff that we’re living in, rots. And things that rot are so […] colorful. It’s amazing on absolutely every level. And we’re dying. It doesn’t make sense. So everything’s about celebrating, and about living. It’s about living.”[1]
-- viviana druga.
[1] Gordon Burn, On the Way to Work, p. 13
[2] Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art. Who are the Style Police? Controversies and Contexts in Recent Art, p. 394.
[3] Tony Godfrey [citing Susan Steward, On Looking, 1993], Conceptual Art. Who are the Style Police? Controversies and Contexts in Recent Art, p. 395
[4] Gordon Burn, On the Way to Work, p. 12
[5] Gordon Burn, On the Way to Work, p. 180 (referring to Ron Mueck’s Dead Dad)
[6] [6] Gordon Burn, On the Way to Work, p. 79
