Damien Hirst: On the Way to Work

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Damien Hirst and his friend, the writer Gordon Burn, provide in On the Way to Work a fascinating window into the mind of one of the most successful artists of the turn of the 21st century. The book, which is beautifully produced, illustrated, and typeset, is a collection of interviews, the first on the eve of Hirst's first major exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London--when he unveiled his infamous shark suspended in a vat of formaldehyde (1991's wonderfully titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. While the book is certainly skewed toward the later years (one interview in January 1992, one in April 1996, three in 1999, and seven in 2000), the reader does get a broad overview of how Hirst's relationships to life, art, and money have progressed. Hirst's fame, his spearheading of the YBA (young British artists) phenomenon, and his subsequent exposure in the gossip columns with the well-documented, and inevitable, drug and drink stories, are all fully covered here. But it is Hirst's genuinely profound artistic imagination and in that best come across: his obsession with death--and with needing to prove his talent as a way to be immortalized in order to escape death--and his ambivalence toward art (the kind of ambivalence much of the public itself exhibits toward modern art) are key here. Also illuminating is Hirst's respect and admiration for Francis Bacon, as well as our discovery of Hirst's skill as a raconteur. If most visual artists show a disappointing inability to discuss their creations, Hirst, at least, shows an enviable ability to tell a divertingly good story: proof, if any were needed, of his working-class roots and his fidelity towards them (surely only the middle classes would see the selling of the fruit of their artistic labors as selling out). Hirst, candidly, sees the art world as always part of the work and space of art, and it is a part he sometimes enjoys, sometimes struggles with, and whose successes he has rightly benefited from. In 1996 Hirst displayed the body of a cow cut up and suspended in 12 vitrines. The piece was called Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything. Hirst seems to have decided that the inevitability of death, so futilely hidden by a society obsessed with youth and , is the only truth--or rather, perhaps, the only incisive fact that may help us to fully live now and eschew those lies in which we all swim and in which we are always in danger of drowning. On the Way to Work is an excellent book and much recommended to anyone who has been fascinated by the sudden rise in the visibility of modern art and what it has to say about society at the beginning of the 21st century. --Mark Thwaite, Amazon.co.uk