Issue 19, February 2008

By Joshua Mack

START
On my way uptown, the subway is delayed and then rerouted because of a police investigation at 77th Street. As I'm sitting on the stalled train, a homeless man in a wheelchair pushes through the crowded car, clutching a filthy paper cup into which a few people drop change. It's the second time I've seen him; the weeping red patch across the top of his foot, where a rectangle of skin is missing, has dried a bit. But his feet are still cracked and his skin is ashy. Before, the wound made me sick. Now I feel desperate that this is what this country has become, and ashamed that most of the people around me are European tourists who now know what America is. What art means afterwards, I don't know.

But the excess of things like Damien Hirst shows, with their portentous titles, are simply unconscionable.

(1) DAMIEN HIRST School: The Archaeology of Lost Desires, Comprehending Infinity, and the Search for Knowledge, Lever House Art Collection

(2) The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, Metropolitan Museum of Art

His self-indulgently trite installation in the lobby of Lever House, the city's first glass-and-steel skyscraper, resembles a church. Thirty stainless autopsy tables are lined up in three rows, like pews; each carries a tank of formaldehyde in which a dead, skinned, trimmed lamb floats. In lieu of an altar, two sides of beef – a reference to Francis Bacon – a birdcage with a dove and an umbrella – Magritte – are arrayed in a larger tank. Steel-and-glass cases containing medications surround the room, lined up against the windows like altars in a nave or cabinets in a vestry.

Like the dead animals he reuses, Hirst is recycling iconography and ideas, such as this gem from the press release: 'Hirst is again commenting on the inevitability of death and the almost religious belief in drugs for eternal salvation.' As it happens, of the 32 medicines in the one cabinet that I looked up, far and away the greatest number – 13 – are treatments for HIV (angina and high blood pressure rate second, with five); so in fact these drugs do not abet a hopeless will to live, but allow millions to enjoy long, productive and creative lives. That a straight, and I presume healthy, white male who has made a fortune selling such ideas to other wealthy straight white men would make such a comment using anti-retrovirals – taken in the main by homosexuals and coloured people – is, to this gay man, disgustingly offensive.

What is sick is a medical system in which corporations profit off people's pain. Of course, Hirst's stainless steel and glass looks decidedly corporate in this – oh my – steel-and-glass lobby. Indeed, the little shock and shiver his dead flesh and dissection tables deliver is really no different from the little frisson delivered by the snippets of blood and the whir of the coroner's saw on American television serials like CSI – Crime Scene Investigation.

Then we have his shark, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), installed at the Metropolitan Museum with three paintings meant to establish a historical context: a copy of John Singleton Copley's Watson and the Shark (c. 1778), which pictures an attack on the comely Watson as he swims in Havana Harbour; Winslow Homer's The Gulf Stream (1899), in which a muscular black sailor sits stoically on the deck of his small boat, its mast snapped, as sharks rise menacingly from the waves; and Francis Bacon's Head 1 (1947–8), in which a howling maw seems to devour the face in which it sits.

Beyond the obvious presence of gaping jaws, these paintings are presented as examples of Edmund Burke's definition of the sublime, in which terror is supposed to evoke an aesthetic and emotional rush greater than provoked by beauty. When you consider the stolid resignation of Homer's sailor, the naked Watson's desperate reach towards a nearby boat or the rough, angry surface of the Bacon, which is a visually stunning metaphor for cruelty to the self, art's ability to communicate emotional truths becomes clear. As to Hirst's shark, it seems pretty and decorative in its tank, more like a specimen in a natural history museum than an object that might encourage contemplation of life and death – beyond that of the shark's. It must have been magnificent when alive. What a waste.

(3) TARA DONOVAN Tara Donovan at the Met, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Donovan's installation, tucked into a rather drab gallery between the first and second floors in the Met's contemporary wing (and on the way downstairs from the Hirst), is just as slight. Drawing on her obsessive, labourintensive use of everyday materials, she has affixed innumerable small loops of Mylar across the room’s three walls, thus creating networks that recall the masses of bubbles which often form on the surface of ponds, the cracked pattern of ice on a window and the accumulation of wax into honeycombs and mud into hives.

Ideally the silver Mylar should reflect light, giving the piece a shimmering, somewhat disembodied presence; although on the dreary day I saw it, it seemed particularly limp. A tour de force of physical effort seemingly for no purpose. Easy art for a general public.

(4) NICOLAS GUAGNINI 77 Testicular Imprints, Andrew Roth

Yes, that's correct, 'testicular imprints', and no, it is not sexy. In a riff on Yves Klein's Anthropométries, Guagnini applied paint to his scrotum and then left an imprint of his ample, apparently hairy equipment on 77 printed items. These include: a block of stamps picturing the young Stalin; a letter from then-US Senator Jacob Javits concerning the Watergate investigation; a poster touting the Guggenheim's many branches; Hitler's letterhead; and sundry MoMA catalogues from group shows held during the 1950s and 60s.

This ephemera, like much old bumf, has interest as a time capsule, but why Guagnini has defaced it, at risk of considerable personal discomfort, is hard to figure. One assumes that as he left his mark, his other endowment was in his hand. His work reeks of the kind of personal indulgence best undertaken in private, although watching that might have been more interesting than this show.

(5) PHILIP GUSTON, JASPER JOHNS, Leo Castelli and Brooke Alexander Editions

This two-gallery show attempts to tease out affinities between Jasper Johns and Philip Guston by opposing decades’ worth of work in which the studios and the artists’ hands and brushes stand as allegories for personal creative exploration. Despite the iconographic overlap, which also includes lightbulbs, watches and eyes, it seems that as Guston worked, he became monumental in his eccentricity, whereas Johns was silly in his seriousness.

The strokes in the former's drawings work against the paper to create space, evincing a vigour that communicates urgency. He sticks a half-eaten sandwich into Hovering (1976), a reference to bodily functions and needs that I doubt Johns would tolerate. The dry surfaces and layered, wilfully obscure and self-referential iconography of his 1980s and 90s work confront the viewer with a quirky and ungenerous world in which he has no place. The almost ecstatic beauty of his drawing Edisto (1962), which features his foot, suggests the magnitude of the passion that has been lost...

[5 down, 99 to go! Read them all in ArtReview magazine