Occupy Your Mind

A short walk away from St Paul’s Cathedral, from the stained glass bank buildings and the streets where London’s Occupy movement made its mark, there’s another temple. Just across the river that divides our city stands the Tate Modern, a veritable place of worship, where the faithful gather to revere sacred objects and hear from the high priests of culture what their tastes should, and should not, be. In one of the vast galleries thousands gather, wander and reflect on huge installations – all thanks to the generous provision of Unilever, the chemical giant which sponsors the Turbine Hall series. Other exhibitions take regular sponsorship – and heavy branding – from UBS. Barclays has dipped its toe in, and, for £10,000 per year, you could also become a ‘Platinum Patron’ – earning the right to dine with Tate directors, and invitations to exclusive trips abroad to Sao Paulo, LA or Dubai.

The Tate may be on the South Bank of the Thames – since time immemorial the more creative and edgy cousin of the old city on the far shore – but it doesn’t mean that the money from the other side hasn’t seeped through, and, opening this April, the man who has defined the capitalist approach to art more than any other gets his first mid-life retrospective.

It didn’t begin this way for Damien Hirst. The son of an absent mechanic father and Citizens’ Advice Bureau working mother, he shoplifted, failed miserably at school and was graded ‘E’ in A-Level art. Moving to London he laboured on building sites, eventually getting in to Goldsmith’s art college where, by curating in disused industrial spaces a series of exhibitions of his and his friends’ work, he gained the attention of the money men who would patronise and commodify his art. The new Tate show will, of course, show two of Hirst’s most notorious works: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) – his shark-in-formaldehyde – and For The Love of God – a human skull cast in platinum and encrusted with £15,000,000 worth of diamonds.

Sharks. Death. Love. God. Money. If Hirst is anything, he is the brash Goldman Sachs of the art world. He has a vast personal fortune of over £200m, accumulated through an alchemy that would leave even the most brash bankers in awe: stock medicine cabinets, spots of paint, flies, butterflies and severed cows heads transformed into pieces that sell for millions.

This transubstantiation is, of course, the mystery that all art holds, and highlights the paradox which every artist must wrestle with: what they create has very little monetary value, and yet can occasionally become enormously valuable. The material costs – vanity works like For The Love of God aside – are usually low, although the personal labour involved in painting and training may be costly. Moreover, no artist worth their salt would ever consider money to be at the heart of their work. No one goes into fine art as a career, as a way of making a living. Artists pursue a vision, a deeply personal exploration of the world and our perception of it. Artists do not create in order to create wealth. And yet, every artist needs to eat, and to eat they must – all of them – ‘sell out’.

The American writer Lewis Hyde has examined this dilemma in his seminal work The Gift. He makes it clear: artists are only truly engaged and exhilarated by their work when it comes to them ‘from elsewhere,’ when they receive some inspiration, some gift for them to mould, represent and pass on. We might pay to enter an exhibition to see works of art, but the price of entry is irrelevant: we go there not for some commodity exchange, but to open ourselves to the possibility of receiving some greater gift that is far beyond the material experience.

Yet artists cannot feed or find shelter through gift alone. And so they are required, if they are to remain able to be open to the time and space required for more gifts to be given them, to sell the works they have made. Their gifts must, for a time, become commodities, objects in a market economy, available to the highest bidder.

The question that we might ask then, as this major retrospective of Hirst’s work opens, is where the gift may still remain in his art. Most of what is on show is not his own labour. He sub-contracted out the actual making of many of his works – the spot paintings, the spin paintings, the medicine cabinets – to a team of employees. These people worked for a fixed wage to create production line pieces from stock components that now sell for vast sums. Sums which they, of course, despite their labour, were excluded from sharing. Hirst held his own sale of huge numbers of these works in 2007, cannily liquidating his ‘gifts’ into hard cash millions just before the current economic crisis hit. He has also been accused of continuing his early shop-lifting: stealing many of his ideas from other artists or craftspeople. With his clout he can get away with it, and copyright the results. Hirst thus comes to us as the perfect artist for our times: a capitalist who exploits labour for vast gain, and pulls up the drawbridge just as the shit begins to fly.

Germaine Greer is clear: ‘Damien Hirst is a brand, because the art form of the 21st century is marketing. To develop so strong a brand on so conspicuously threadbare a rationale is hugely creative – revolutionary even.’ She is applying a clever double twist: Hirst isn’t an artist, but a manufacturer of objects who has developed a careful brand. And yet our delight at his doing this – for the forthcoming exhibition is expected to be vastly popular – reflects on us as branded consumers, thus opening up the possibility of returning Hirst to the place of an artist performing social critique.

Personally, I think Hirst’s artistic vision has become utterly corrupted, though he cannot necessarily be blamed for his own popularity. That is a question we need to ask ourselves. So perhaps this is the best we can do if we go to the exhibition: use the pieces not to be amazed at who he is as a visual artist, but to reflect more carefully on who we are as observers – and consumers – of that art.

Indeed, I believe that acts of careful self-reflection must be at the heart of the journey of all involved in the Occupy movement now that ‘the beginning has ended’. The physical occupation of certain physical places has come to a close for a while, but this is not necessarily a bad thing (see my previous piece on Occupation as TAZ) because it allows us to think about the personal foundations on which we are building once again, away from the day-to-day running of a particular site.

In his book on the banking crisis First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Slavoj Zizek encourages this move beyond some of the more obvious targets of capitalist protest, and on to deeper levels of action.

‘The enclosure of the commons is a process of proletarianisation of those who are excluded from their own substance… The present conjecture compels us to radicalise it to an existential level well beyond Marx’s imagination. We need a more radical notion of the proletarian subject.’[1]

Bankers have been the focus of ire for some time now, but their values and morals are lived out in so many others who exist in many other fields. What Zizek is suggesting is that we need to think beyond bankers, beyond front-line economics, right to the heart of who we are as individual subjects. The church used to be the place where this process of self-analysis occurred; the grand aisles of our modern galleries have now taken that role for many.

In our reaction to art we can find a reflection of our true values, and for this reason I hope people go to see Hirst’s show – for free if they can – and become angered and fired up for action by the corrupt moral and economic vision he presents. Yet I also hope that we allow these works to ask tough questions of ourselves too: are we people of ‘the gift’? How enraptured are we to brands? To what do we ascribe beauty and meaning? Michael Franti once said that ‘the hardest part in any revolution is the personal revolution,’ and it is in our responses to what we find at the Tate, as much as The Royal Exchange, that we will find that battle beginning to be won.

By Kester Brewin | @kesterbrewin  |  kesterbrewin.com