On a Sunday, there’s mayhem at Tate Modern. There are so many people milling about that you can hardly move; what with babies screaming, kids running up and down, mobiles ringing and people chatting, these are the worst possible circumstances in which to view art. And yet the hordes keep coming, but why?
One of the attractions is the fine view from Tate Modern across the river to St Paul’s Cathedral. When Sir Giles Gilbert Scott designed the original Bankside Power Station, he was instructed to make its chimney lower than the spire of the cathedral. They didn’t want an industrial monster upstaging their sacred edifice; God had to be seen to rise above Mammon, even if it meant polluting the air breathed by the populace with belching smoke.
The irony is that, standing in the former Turbine Hall, an astonishing 152m-long and 30m-high space, you can’t help being impressed by its similarity to a cathedral. Perhaps people flock to Tate Modern and other cathedrals of culture in search of something religion no longer provides; congregations are mutating into culture vultures.
Watching people amble round galleries in a bemused state, I often wonder what they get out of the experience. They can’t find many answers or derive much comfort from what they see. After all, the days have long since gone when the church commissioned artists to produce images offering solace and redemption, and now they work freelance, artists speak for no one but themselves. They tend to be as sceptical as the next person and to produce work that, rather than attempting to provide answers, only mirrors our doubt, confusion and dismay.
Brought up a Catholic, Damien Hirst insists that he is a non-believer now, and yet, judging by his recent work, religion or, rather, faith is emphatically on his mind. He has never shied away from the big questions summed up by Paul Gauguin in his painting, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
Early pieces like the famous shark were prompted by an obsessive fear of death and a desire for immortality which, as a lapsed Catholic, he can no longer take for granted. Peering into the jaws of the pickled predator, you literally stare death in the face while, metaphorically, you confront the void created by absence of belief.
‘The things you obsess about are the things you make art about,’ says Hirst. ‘I obsess about death and mortality, especially my own.’ Now, though, religion is firmly on the agenda; the new work explores the phenomenon of belief. Superstition is showing simultaneously at the Gagosian galleries in Los Angeles and Davies Street, London. Embedded in paint, thousands of butterfly wings create complex, recurring patterns that are exquisitely beautiful yet completely lifeless. Hirst has been producing butterfly paintings for years, but these arched and circular canvases openly resemble
stained-glass windows. Instead of light shining through with subtle radiance, the opaque surfaces shimmer with dusty iridescence. Beautiful but spooky, the results remind one of the skills of an embalmer or mortician – a deathly parody of everlasting life. Butterflies have long been symbols of transcendence. For the Victorians, they represented the soul escaping the body. But trapped in paint, these spread-eagled specimens are definitively earthbound.
Forget cathedrals of culture, Hirst is not beating about the bush; he is showing his New Religion exhibition in All Hallows on the Wall, one of the 47 churches in the Square Mile. The exhibition comes packed in an altar-like chest covered in a white leather cloth embossed with a dove, a pill and the artist’s name. Lift the lid and you find five sculptures nestling in white satin as though in a reliquary, while the drawers beneath house portfolios of prints. In All Hallows the sculptures are arranged on an altar-like table, the prints hang on the walls and behind the altar a triptych of butterfly canvases is installed.
The theme is the relationship between art, science and religion, but the message is ambiguous. If Marx described religion as the opiate of the masses, Hirst identifies pills as the panacea of the people; medicine is the new religion. Prints featuring legal and illegal drugs show them in capsule form, cheerily coloured cherry red and canary yellow, or as lozenges gleaming with a soft sheen of pink or dusty blue. Titles like The Last Supper and captions such as ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life’ confirm the ubiquity and importance of these seductive products. A crucifix is inlaid with pills, saints are represented by capsules (rather than attributes such as a book, keys or a wheel) and the Eucharist wafer has been replaced by a marble tab that resembles a paracetamol.
Subtlety has never been his strong point and, as usual, Hirst opts for maximum impact. Sprinkled with diamond dust, the teeth of a printed skull sparkle in a manic but cheerless grin. Cast in silver and patinated black, a child’s skull reminds you that the Reaper strikes when he pleases. The jaw is lined with baby teeth and ranks of new ones wait to come through – the child was still growing when it died. A silver heart is stuck with pins, sliced with razor blades and girded in barbed wire. Ladling on the glitter and the symbolism like this is in thoroughly bad taste, of course, but so are the statues in Catholic churches that show the Madonna nursing a bleeding heart pierced with knives.
Francis Bacon is often cited as an influence on Hirst, but the work of Jeff Koons also blew him away when he saw it at the Saatchi Gallery in 1988, while still a student at Goldsmiths. And consciously or not, the title of the All Hallows exhibition owes a debt to the American artist, who announced that his porcelain statue of St John the Baptist cradling a pig and a penguin ‘proclaims a new religion, namely that of emptiness and banality’. Some of the work adopts a more forensic approach, though. Mounted inside a cross-shaped frame, The Wounds of Christ gives a medical slant to the crucifixion. Photographs of corpses and wounded men have been electronically marked with the stigmata and, titled The Sacred Heart, a shot of an open-heart operation indicates the power of surgery to combat death. When American artist Andreas Serrano photographed murder and suicide victims in the morgue, he accorded the anonymous corpses the status of saints and martyrs through the beauty of the images. But Hirst opts for the opposite extreme. Using photographs bought from the Science Photo Library, he robs the crucifixion of all pathos.
There’s black humour too. The Last Supper is a map of the world indicating countries with nuclear weapons. Conveniently there are 13 of them – the number of apostles at the meal. Under scrutiny, such analogies may crumble, but New Religion is meant as a provocation rather than a rationalization. ‘As an artist,’ says Hirst, ‘I’ve always thought the best you can do is set up triggers... I don’t think for a moment you’re going to get an answer through science alone, or through religion alone. Or indeed through art alone... Basically, the world is pretty fucked-up and full of horror, so you have to trawl around for answers, for hope, for some light.’ As churches empty and galleries fill, most artists employ religious imagery only to usurp its power or query its authority. Typically, though, Hirst bucks the trend. He takes us back to church and, without a trace of embarrassment, exploits the literalness of religious kitsch for his own purposes.