Thirty years ago, when I walked into the Saatchi gallery in London, I saw something wildly liberating and compulsive: a huge tiger shark that seemed to swim forward through clear blue liquid, with just a sheet of glass between you and its jaws. But the shark you see on entering Damien Hirst’s survey of his formaldehyde creations is not the same work: it’s Jaws 2, or even Jaws 3, the one where the mother shark attacks an aquarium. It is called Death Denied and was made in 2008, a fresher version of the notoriously decaying original, titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. But even 14 years is a long time for a dead shark, and this one’s getting very shrunken around the mouth.
Any fear of those teeth – and the inevitable advance of death they symbolise – rapidly dissipates as you take in the progress of Hirst from raw young punk to pretentious money-lover. It is still possible to put on a strong exhibition of his early work, with its genuine sense of grabbing something from this short life, but what we see here instead is how his original desire to shock has become empty and artificial. Somewhere along the line he stopped feeling it.
Behind the shark are three tall tanks with a dissected upright sheep in each, like the three crosses in a medieval altarpiece. Of course, he’s emulating Francis Bacon, who took the gothic art form of the triptych (or three-part altarpiece) and filled it with painted meat, purple and grey emanations of godless flesh. Does Hirst want to be Bacon? He isn’t.
The Pursuit of Oblivion is a towering tank, inside which an umbrella floats over an empty overcoat on a chair, among sides of beef and butchery tools hanging in still, clear fluid. It is a homage to Bacon’s crushingly real nightmares, especially his 1946 canvas, Painting. The cleavers and knives remind you of Bacon’s admiration for butchers’ shops. As the eloquent Soho existentialist once said between drinks: “Ham, pigs, tongues, sides, of beef seen in the butcher’s window, all that death, I find it very beautiful.”
Bacon waxed lyrical about meat but what he put on canvas was paint. His smears of pink and grey, his sickening orange backgrounds and tubular furniture, are acts of imagination. Hirst’s vitrine looks like the artistic effort of someone with no imagination. Why can’t you create a Bacon masterpiece with real meat and a real umbrella? Because it becomes banal. It’s like pretending that by exhibiting a pig sliced in two to reveal its guts you’ve made a powerful modern version of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical drawings. Oh and yes, Hirst does try that one here, too.
The more art history his vitrines quote, the sillier they seem. Chopping off a cow’s head to create The Beheading of John the Baptist (2006) does seem a bloody waste. It just does not achieve the same pathos and horror as Caravaggio could get by painting a man with his head half removed in a prison yard and the executioner reaching with his knife to sever the last flap of skin.
That’s because Caravaggio and Bacon were painting human suffering. Many will be offended by the fact that every work in this show is made with dead animals. But, paradoxically, you would have to believe every animal death equal to the death of a human to be moved in the right way by The Beheading of John the Baptist. As someone who still eats meat, it would be hypocritical for me to weep. So the only people who can take Hirst seriously are more likely to be outside the gallery protesting.
To be fair, he’s closer to veganism than you might think. His early 1997 piece Shut Up and Eat Your Fucking Dinner is a grotesque recreation of a butcher’s window. It looks like a memory of being sickened by windows full of dead animals when he was a little boy in Leeds. But this ghost of sensitivity fades in the cold, industrial output of fake masterpieces that surround it. This is art for the penthouses of oligarchs who look out of their windows and ask who really cares about all those pieces of meat walking about down there.
Damien Hirst: Natural History is at Gagosian Britannia Street, London