It is a virtue of art that it can record the state of the artist's soul, and it is a virtue of Damien Hirst's art that it works toward this revelation, this expression of his philosophy of life. His works are remarkably self-sufficient and transparent, and the viewer cannot help but interpret them. However, this intellectual expression leads to an anti-intellectual interpretation. Hirst's works are intellectually constructed advocates of carnality.

According to philosopher Immanuel Kant, one must maintain a disinterested attitude to properly view an object in an aesthetic manner. This does not mean that one is not interested, but rather, that one sets aside personal interests, references, and emotions. It is impossible to do so when faced with Hirst's work. You react in a most personal way — with your body. In the title piece of the exhibit, Theories, Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results, and Findings, two vitrines are filled with bouncing Ping-Pong balls; you enjoy pure sensation — the free play of information from the senses (rather than Kant's free play of the imaginative faculties). You watch this piece peaceably and passively, like babies staring at crib mobiles or cats staring at aquariums — and then you go into the next room, where you stare at an aquarium. The show in fact has two huge vitrines filled with underwater gynecologists' office setups and legions of fish, one called Lost Love and the other Love Lost. These works bring in the traditional Hirst theme of decay (previously seen in his works with rotting animal parts). The process here is subtler and less odoriferous. The gynecologist's chairs, new at the beginning of the show, quickly encrust with rust.

Hirst's spot paintings are not beautiful, not amusing, but are instead works of complicated enjoyment. These paintings, with white fields covered in large evenly-spaced pastel dots, are pleasant. When you learn that Hirst picks the pleasant hues from shades used by pharmaceutical companies for their pills, your enjoyment becomes complicated by the spin; the extra information tempts interpretation, but the experience remains enjoyment, because the works affect your body, not mind. Your interpretations of Hirst's works are really analyses of your own physical reaction to them. Concerning the interaction that he tries to set up between the viewer and the work, Hirst says that "the intellect is still engaged, but it is an intellect involved in an anxious body, viscerally conscious" (http://homestead.juno.com/ damienhirst/files/bio.html). The lack of intellectual stimulation, as compared with the manifold physical sensations, is striking.

Damien Hirst, Concentrating on a Self-Portrait as a Pharmacist, 2000

In all of the vitrines set up with models and furniture (dioramas of medical research, the artist's studio or home-and-office) there are only two pieces of text. A postcard hangs on the glass wall of the medical researcher's station, reading, "wish you were here". On a mirror surrounded by air fresheners and bags of what the gallery calls "body parts", is scrawled in lipstick, "Stop me B-4 I kill again." These are expected messages — no surprises, no thought necessary. In the home side of the vitrine, two books sit on a desk. One's title is too weathered to be discerned; the other is a dictionary, a book which is key to Hirst's works: what book could less inspire the Kantian "free play of the imagination" than a dictionary? A common theme of the diorama works is the non-use of the intellect. Many of them have unused pads of paper with capped pens and pristine pencils. Even the vitrine of the artist's studio, the supposed domain of creativity, is filled with unusable, dried-up paints. Hirst himself has said that "[i]t is almost impossible to avoid mentally inhabiting [these kinds of works]. This transforms the viewer's function from that of an exploratory intelligence to that of a rather doubtful collaborator (or victim). This is work [that] asks to be experienced, not solved" (ibid.).

Even more frequently than the blank pads of paper, cigarettes appear, unused in packs and used, stubbed out in ashtrays. Food, in the form of nibbled-on sandwiches, also makes appearances. If we are supposed to imagine ourselves inside the vitrines, all we would have to do there is eat and smoke, in other words, satisfy bodily urges — but not all of them. While cigarettes are prominent, alcohol is not. Perhaps Hirst views smoking as more symbolic than drinking. He has said that the "cigarette packet is possible lives, the cigarette its own actual life, the lighter is God because it gives fuel to the whole thing, and the ashtray is a graveyard, it's like death" (ibid.).

		Damien Hirst, Theories, Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results, and Findings, 2000

The viewer reacts to Hirst's works with his or her body, and the works concern the body — its pleasures, functions, and composition. This corporeal focus is most evident in the vitrines of medical models and skeletons, human and animal. Here is the body without the mind, a machine with various uses, different from animals only in shape and form. The difference between man and animal is not shown to be spiritual or intellectual; these things have little place or reality in Hirst's view of man. This reduction of man to his animal functions is no belittlement. The largest work in the show, Hymn, is an enormous bronze anatomical model that monumentalizes the body while leaving aside the mind.

Look too at Hirst's Last Supper, the work with the most text in the show. This piece is a series of prints that look like combinations of drug labels and food stickers. Each panel has a food name like "Chicken Tripe" or "Foie Gras", followed by pharmaceutical language like "Ferrous Fumarate BR 146 mg" and then corporate language, like "Hirst plc," "Pharmaceutical Division," "Hirst House," etc." with the artist's initials, "DH" in a circular logo. The only texts that the non-pharmacist can understand are the food names (focus on the body) and Hirst's own name.

The seeming monumentalization of science is really a mockery of its methods: Hirst says, "you can only cure people for so long, and then they're going to die anyway . . . You can't arrest decay, but these works suggest you can" (ibid.). Hirst's use of medical equipment is a convenient way to both focus on the body and remind the viewer of medicine's inability to protect this body from death. For example, one work, a case of hundreds of handmade replicas of pills, looks more like a tribute to, rather than a denigration of, pharmaceuticals. Only the title, The Void, tells us how to interpret it. If we are supposed to live in reference to our bodies, we must also be aware of the inevitability of death. Hirst seems to equivocate over this issue. He says: "I am aware of mental contradictions in everything, like: I am going to die and I want to live forever. I can't escape the fact and I can't let go of the desire" (http://ds.dial.pipex.com/edwards.family/nathan/hirst/hirsthome.html). The issue of what happens to our bodies after death is also confused. Some works suggest that death is a cleanly scientific happening. Others, like Adam and Eve present a more horrific picture. Two shrouded "bodies" on steel gurneys, surrounded by grisly saws and scalpels as well as bits of bone and fat (from what looks like a cooked chicken) make death seem to be a violation of the body, an unnatural reversal and deprivation.

The show presents a coherent philosophy of life: the way to live is through the pleasures and sensations of the body; the best way to do this is to not deceive oneself about death. Hirst seems to live this way himself. The most striking thing about the show and about Hirst's career as a whole, is his determination to make himself wealthy, famous, and happy. By far, the most prevalent text in the show is Hirst's own name. Hirst wants to sell himself so that he can have the resources to live as he thinks best. Whether that way of life, the way his art promotes, is truly the best or not, is up to the viewer to decide. That decision requires the mind — hopefully not silenced by the alternate focus of his art.

Damien Hirst , "Theories, Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results, and Findings," Gagosian Gallery, September 23 — December 19, 2000.

Photos courtesy of Science Ltd./Gagosian Gallery