Charlotte Appleyard breaks the news that Britain’s most controversial artist has been commissioned by the nation’s favourite cathedral
In early November we can expect, if not murder, then certainly uproar in the cathedral, when an ‘important’ new work by Damien Hirst is unveiled. St Paul’s, that great symbol of all that’s best about Britain, is set to play host to an artist many believe represents all that’s worst. Details of the work itself are not available yet — in fact even approaching the staff at St Paul’s provoked mild panic: how had I found out? What did I know? But one thing we can at least be certain about: Damien Hirst is unlikely to break his bonds with controversy. Though even cash-strapped St Paul’s wouldn’t go as far as actual sacrilege, the work is bound to be contentious.
So here is another controversial thought: maybe this isn’t just a bid for cheap publicity, perhaps it’s a courageous commission and an important milestone in the nation’s history of art?
Hirst is not an entirely inappropriate choice for the cathedral. In 1994 he produced a preserved cow called Prodigal Son and his most recent show at White Cube with the infamous diamond skull was christened For the Love of God. It’s not the first time his work has appeared in a church either. In 2007, All Hallows in the City of London exhibited his pill cabinets alongside hearts sliced with razor blades and a triptych of butterfly paintings behind the altar. At the time he was quoted as referring to his gruesome formaldehyde-preserved beasts as crucifixions, and he used severed cow heads to represent the apostles. The work has revealed him to be, despite his self-proclaimed lapsed Catholicism, a happy hostage to religious forms. His work may often be provoking and even offensive, but even his harshest critics would allow that he understands how to harness the power of religious imagery.
The problem is, of course, that St Paul’s isn’t a normal church: it’s a symbol of the nation. Ever since the photographs of Sir Christopher Wren’s dome surviving the blitz when most of the city lay in ruins, it’s almost become religion in its own right. St Paul’s is stone and brass, solid and traditional. Hirst is brash, commercial and obsessed with his own celebrity. Or so conventional wisdom would have it.
The British have always liked to get huffy about art in churches. This is in itself a tradition. In 1962 Graham Sutherland, an official war artist and contemporary of Francis Bacon, was commissioned to create a large tapestry of Christ in majesty to hang behind the altar at Coventry Cathedral. It’s an odd composition with a bottom-heavy Jesus that seems to be sitting in an awkward perspective, tipped towards the viewer. Nobody liked it and condemnation reached the national press, despite Sutherland’s much earlier conversion to Catholicism, and his apparently deeply held Christian faith. Many believe that modern art is as a whole inappropriate if not downright bad.
In the 1980s St Stephen Walbrook, another Wren church in the Square Mile, commissioned Sir Henry Moore to design a new altar. His response was to erect a coarsely cut rock of marble looking more like a pagan altar or a chunk of Camembert. Its appearance contrasted sharply with the beloved Baroque of the church and angered purists. But here’s a thought for those who assume St Paul’s should never host a Hirst: Moore’s stone slab and its controversial history, has, over time, become as much a part of the church’s appeal as its coffered dome.
No one should begrudge Hirst a little divine intervention, because he is no longer really the darling of the Young British Artist generation. In the 1990s his friendship with the ‘Cool Britannia’ crowd and his shenanigans at the Groucho Club (the stories are well known but almost certainly in part apocryphal) made him an enfant terrible, a representative of the idea of art and the new rock ’n’ roll. But the brotherhood now regard him as a sellout, largely due to the publicity surrounding the estimated £95 million sale at Sotheby’s last September, and he now he finds himself trapped in a limbo of his own making.
And the irony is that for all the headlines Hirst seems to create, whether it be for pickling his beasts or flogging the lot in a single artist auction, his contemporaries — the other YBAs — have already worked their way into established religious contexts. Both Rachel Whiteread and Marc Quinn have been commissioned to produce works for Winchester Cathedral. Both are also represented by Damien Hirst’s dealer, Jay Jopling, who with his White Cube gallery seems to have the monopoly on the YBA. Whiteread created some characteristic negative space by casting the inside of two tombs to be placed in the nave of the cathedral, while Quinn unveiled the rather creepy ‘Angel’, a bronze sculpture cast from the skeleton of a 28-week-old foetus kneeling as if in prayer. The church does not require that the artists are believers themselves; rather just that they take the unique nature of the context seriously. The same qualifications, in fact, as were needed by their Renaissance predecessors.
Hirst is no fool; he’s a charmer, and despite the media persona, he’s not instantly recognisable in person. A receptionist friend of mine at Sotheby’s still cringes at the memory of asking a pair of strange men in reception who they were, only to be told: ‘Damien Hirst and Bono’. Interestingly, neither of them were remotely upset about not being recognised.
This seems to be the year in which Hirst tries for a more serious reputation. In October he will exhibit new paintings in the Wallace Collection, better known for its Old Masters by Rembrandt and Velázquez. The paintings, unusually, are all his own work. Rosalind Savill, the museum’s director, has been reported as saying that the appearance of his work in a more traditional environment will actually prove that Hirst’s work is part of the European painting tradition — that it never broke free from that tradition at all, despite what the papers might say.
So Hirst clearly understands the importance or at least the usefulness of the canon of art history, the pathos of Christianity and the resonance of its visual language. Perhaps most importantly, he understands the power of using St Paul’s, a flamboyantly religious context, in this fervently irreligious age. And St Paul’s certainly understands the power of Hirst.
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