Flesh and blood

Published 22 September 2003

A giant secular martyr, the apostles as cows' heads in formaldehyde and surgical cabinets named after saints . . . Despite the explicit religious iconography, Damien Hirst's exhibition more closely resembles an abattoir than a temple

Clutching a button-eyed teddy bear in one hand and a pale collection box in the other, the disabled girl gazes over Hoxton Square's park like a forlorn colossus. Based on a charity donation figure made half a century ago, she has been expanded to a monumental size and cast in bronze. But Damien Hirst, who uses this new statue as an open-air proclamation of his solo show at the nearby White Cube gallery, has not simply blown up his source material to titanic dimensions. Walking round this six-ton behemoth, we discover that plaintiveness gives way to a shocking, savage mood. For the locked door, once slammed shut firmly in the back of the girl's blue dress, is now skewered open. Whoever committed this violation has plundered the tomb-like darkness within, taking all the donated money away. A scratched crowbar lies on the circular black plinth below, flung down like a final insult. And a few stray, low-value coins, bearing dates between 1958 and 1966, have been left behind as well. These modest old pennies and threepenny bits, all flaunting profile images of a young and optimistic Queen, suggest that some of the donors could ill-afford to give their petty cash away.

Once we realise that this supremely cynical robbery has occurred, our reaction to the front of Hirst's sculpture changes. With her carefully drawn eyebrows and upturned nose, the girl at first seemed capable of triumphing over her disability. After all, she carries a box inscribed with the words "Please Give Generously", and few could resist her wistful appeal. But the theft turns this waif into an embodiment of futility. There was no point in exposing her useless right leg, rigidly enclosed in its cruel splint. However much sympathy may have been elicited by the trapped limb, along with her bare anorexic arms and scuffed left knee, the crime has made a nonsense of all her fundraising ambitions.

It also prompts us to look at the sculpture's surroundings with disenchanted eyes. Although an official notice proudly announces that the Hoxton Square park was "refurbished" in 1995, the placard itself is now looking dingy. A grubby skip and two wheelie-bins stand in the vicinity, packed with litter. Despite escalating property values and new-found fashionableness, Hoxton Square exudes urban seediness. A security guard has been employed to protect Hirst's Charity during its five-week sojourn in this tree-lined locale.

A decade ago, a memorable precedent for his new sculpture was set by Kerry Stewart, who made a fibreglass charity figure called The Boy From the Chemist Is Here to See You. He stood wanly behind a semi-opaque glass door, waiting for donations. But Hirst's 22-foot image is far more violent, reflecting an urge to explore the gruesomeness of martyrdom. Although this girl is a secular statue, she hovers on the edge of sainthood. And her immense size turns her, paradoxically, into a target more vulnerable than Stewart's far smaller work.

The notion of martyrdom is given a more explicit religious form in the rest of Hirst's exhibition. His main space at White Cube has been transformed into an arena where the 12 apostles are assembled, although no trace of their figures can be discerned. We are presented instead with a sequence of steel and glass cabinets ranged along the side walls. They recall, at first sight, the chilling pharmaceutical world Hirst explored in many of his earlier works. But clinical purity is here replaced by a relentless preoccupation with suffering and destruction. Even if plenty of the vessels and tubes resting on these shelves are still intact, they have become besmirched by blood.

This is far and away the most expressionist show that Hirst has ever mounted. The bell jars, crucibles and flasks are now accompanied by surgical scissors, knives and crumpled tissues soaked in gore. Peering in at these sacrificial objects is alarmingly akin to examining the aftermath of illicit medical operations. Here and there, specific references can be found to an apostle: St Peter is represented by his cluster of keys, while the thick rope in another cabinet refers to the suicidal hanging of Judas. On the whole, though, these gruesome receptacles testify to a larger vision of a world where pain and brutality flourish ever more ruthlessly.

The centre of the end wall is dominated by a 13th cabinet, where the glass shelves remain bare and the clean vessels above are surmounted by a stuffed dove. Flanked by two large paintings where dead butterflies float in lucid blue skies, this pristine cabinet is clearly intended to symbolise the resurrection. But the promise it strives to provide, through the ascension of Jesus, is outweighed by evidence of anguish and devastation elsewhere. Most of the room is closer in mood to a charnel house. Holes have been cut in some of the glass fronts, allowing the blood to emerge and run down the cabinets before splashing in droplets on the floor below. In one particularly unnerving work, a gore-drenched vessel dangles outside a hole like an organ wrenched wholesale from a body. Beneath, blood-soaked plastic tubing is coiled in a clotted mess, suggesting that no one has bothered to clear up after some heinous act of brutality.

Each cabinet is named after a saint, and the carefully inverted glass vessels in one of them refer to St Peter's fate when he was crucified upside-down. But looking at the contents of the other cabinets, where a skull, a bone, a hammer and a bloody axe can be detected, we do not think of Christ's beleaguered disciples, but are forced to meditate on the darkest aspects of our own time. This harsh imperative ensures that Hirst's exhibition cannot simply be seen as a return to religion. The main room also contains two large paintings called Devotion and Rapture, where hundreds of butterfly wings are assembled in mandala-like patterns saturated with radiant colour. But their impact is countered by the gruelling sight of a cabinet pierced, vertically and horizontally, by spears.

As if to reinforce his obsession with mortality at the expense of transcendence, Hirst also represents the violated disciples as a series of cows' heads marooned in their own glass tanks. There they rest, swimming in formaldehyde and exposed in all their blanched, skinned rawness. Unlike the charity girl supported by her hefty plinth, they lie on the floor in lowly, abject positions that accentuate their plight. Each one relates to its neighbouring wall-cabinet, and we can identify Judas as the blindfolded black cow who faces the other way. In the main, however, these pallid remnants smack of the abattoir rather than the temple. The outraged response of Anglican clerics to this exhibition proves how far Hirst remains from conventional Christian faith.

Upstairs, in a smaller yet no less provo-cative room, Hirst terminates the show with a suite of 13 "paintings" called "The Cancer Chronicles". They are the most daunting and powerful images on view. All these large, midnight-black pictures are heavily encrusted with flies. Mixed with resin, the dead insects look so mashed together that they have become congealed. Hirst gives each image a different title, but they all centre on life-threatening afflictions: Cholera, Leukaemia, Meningitis or Aids. Even the Bubonic Plague is cited, introducing an illness redolent of some distant, possibly biblical past. And on the floor, the Old Testament is brought to mind again in a two-part sculpture called Adam and Eve (Breaking Open the Head). Both the cows' heads, again in tanks filled with formaldehyde, are sliced by a fusillade of mirrored shards. They may look like victims of a terrorist explosion that sent glass fragments flying into defenceless faces. But on another level, the shards might possess a liberating force, enabling the heads to be invaded by new ideas. At any rate, they appear more ambiguous than "The Cancer Chronicles", where the helplessly embedded flies speak of nothing except pestilence and mass burials. They imply that religion has not yet provided any salvation from the bleak inevitability of the grave.

Hirst's show continues at White Cube, Hoxton Square, London N1 (020 7930 5373) until 19 October. Richard Cork's four books on modern art, 1970-2000, were recently published by Yale

Post this article to