The Devil and Damien Hirst

A Collection of Works at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts

BY DOUG FRETTY

A NAUSEOUS SMELL LURKS in the Boston MFA's Foster Gallery, and it emanates from a seven-foot-tall black square. Museum-goers follow their noses to the square, study it cautiously-it looks like a chunk of volcanic rock protruding from the gallery wall. They come in for a close-up, arching their eyes over their glasses and filling their nostrils with a big, hard whiff. Baffled, they read the placard next to the black square and immediately leap away. The placard reads: "Judgment Day, flies and resin on canvas." The museum-goers are sniffing 49 square feet of decaying, roiling flies.

Welcome to the land of Damien Hirst, where science and religion fornicate and die in each other's arms to teach us something about the art of death and the death of art.

Away From The Flock

Hirst is not just a man-he's an acronym. He's a YBA (that is, a young British artist), and sometime around 1988 he was beamed down to tell you the bad news: that it is physically impossible for a living mind to understand death. He subtly conveyed this message with his first masterwork, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, an embalmed tiger shark staring out from a glass coffin and a hundred gallons of formaldehyde.

The MFA didn't get the shark, but they did acquire a piece called Away From the Flock, whose materials list reads, "Steel, glass, formaldehyde solution, and lamb." The little guy's fluffy tail wags frozenly behind him while a cute black hoof pauses in mid-step, as though Hirst had caught the lamb unawares in the meadow and mummified him on the spot. Away From the Flock has something to do with Christ and all that, but staring at a petrified quadruped raises only the vaguest notion of a message. It's like what Woody Allen took away from speed-reading War and Peace-"it's about Russia."

Half-bakedness has been the scourge of pop art since the soup can went to a party and got introduced to the Xerox machine. The YBAs don't think that you even need to pose a question to make a statement; the possibility of a question is enough. YBA Cornelia Parker makes her money by flattening objects with a steamroller. (This might be about commercialism. Or, you know, not.) YBA Tracey Emin won Britain's prestigious Turner Prize for decorating a gallery with her bed. (Is it about feminism? Post-colonialism? It's her bed, people!) Sometimes YBA might as well stand for "why be an artist at all?"

The Collector

Then again, there's the giant glass box sitting in the middle of the floor. It's called The Collector, and inside its clear walls Damien Hirst has assembled a hallucinatory freak show so visceral and evocative that the most puritanical purist will forget that it's pop art and surrender to spectacle. The box contains a life-size laboratory/green house in which a moving animatronic scientist examines dissected butterflies through a microscope amidst potted plants and petri dishes. Throughout this environment gambol a throng of live butterflies; they drink from the dishes, light on the scientist's head, and blithely commingle with their dismembered comrades. Surrounding the lab is a moat of sand, broken glass, and pig's blood.

Hirst's best piece at the MFA, The Collector, encourages philosophical musings on the role of science in art, and the role of life in both. Those butterflies, radiating pleasure and optimism, underline the robotic scientist's deadliness. The bloody sand outside throws the lab's Jolly Rancher palette into eye-popping relief, like Dalí's stretches of dull desert that suddenly break into scenes of fantastical caravans.

But philosophy isn't necessary to enjoy the scenes in this glass box. At a time when a ball of earwax might be called art if it found its way onto a canvas, a modern structure like The Collector is impressive for its meticulous grandness. Whether a single real idea occupied Hirst's brain while he played with his giant bug jar/erector set, the man didn't phone it in. He polished and fretted while his colleagues ran things over with steamrollers and made a museum look like a nice place to take a nap. Another butterfly creation in the Foster exhibit, called The Unbearable Likeness of Being, is an ovular kaleidoscope of wings plucked from the insects' bodies and glued onto the canvas. Perfectly symmetrical and larger than the tallest man in the room, Likeness of Being testifies that Damien Hirst's chief priority is not theology or meta-science, but care. In the age of the earwax ball, where "Study of a Line" is apparently the title of a painting, care might be enough.

"A Collection of Works by Damien Hirst" shows at the MFA through April 24.

Doug Fretty B'05 has read The Unbearable Lightness of Being and thinks it's about Russia

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