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The Fan: Damien Hirst on Francis Bacon

I think Bacon is one of the greatest painters of all time. He's up there with Goya, Soutine and Van Gogh: dirty painters who wrestle with the dark stuff. He's complicated. It's not essentially about formal skill or technique or dexterity. It's about belief. I believe! And the struggle, the sense that you somehow grunt your way though it by sheer will. That's what's inspiring to me, alongside the sheer bravery of confronting the dark side, the shadows, the full force of the human psyche.

If you compare him to Lucien Freud, say, it's obvious that Freud is the more technically accomplished painter. He can read what he sees, and render it. Bacon couldn't do that. If you look at the feet in his paintings, they're bloody awful. He can't do boots. [Laughs] But it's so bloody powerful. His work always veers into the imagination. There's always this raw, dark power, this visceral energy that is compelling. The paint is alive.

Great art comes from nowhere. In a way, I think Bacon said "fuck off" to what went before. He didn't go the traditional route that the great painters went. He didn't have the patience to be like Velasquez or Ingres or whoever. He used to look to these guys, but he just didn't have the patience to be like them and do what they did. He painted from photographs, he stuck bits of corduroy in there, bits of glass, whatever it took to get there.

He talked about the brutality of fact. It's incredibly brave to take that on, to face up to the horror and stare it down. Over and over. I mean, I've made maybe four good pieces and the rest are, you know, sort of happy. He wasn't like that. He was his own worst and best critic. He pushed himself to the edge every time. They give you the shivers, his best paintings. He looks into the room that no one wants to look in. He looks in the mirror and he sees meat. He shuns tenderness. He wants to sleep on a hard bed. I think he saw the brutality early on and he decided to take it on.

I saw him a few times in the Colony but I avoided him, because he was my hero. And I saw him be cruel and abusive to people around him. He was a bad drunk. He was wrestling with the darkness all the time. The idea of putting yourself into your art is a weird one. It makes for a hard life. The fears, the dread, the hopes even; you have to stand naked. I once made this work called Standing Alone on the Precipice and Overlooking the Arctic Wastelands of Pure Terror. It's from a book I read. I actually think Bacon lived like that. There's a nasty, angsty, brutish edge to his work that is somehow about the nasty comedown side of things, the horrific hangover, the psychic fallout of the heavy drinking, the shadowy things you glimpse at the edge of your vision, the existential terror. It's like you can surround yourself with things that give you comfort or you can live an animalistic life. He chose the latter, leaving his animal tracks in the snow.

I went around to his studio one night when I was on the charlie [cocaine]. John Edwards took me around. John was really upset about his death and we were all off our heads, but you could feel this huge presence. And this huge absence. It was palpable.

I was obsessed with him as a young painter. I was into punk and I was into Bacon. He was out there on his own. You had the Surrealists, the Impressionists, the Pointillists and all the other ists, and you had Bacon. I gave up painting at 15 because of him. I was just doing bad Bacons. I saw his work and I stopped wanting to be a painter. I stepped aside into sculpture. I've gone back lately, though. For the last two years I've been in the shed slapping paint on canvas. Big and small paintings. Skulls, crows, tryptichs. Dark blue. Baconesque. He's a supreme colourist. Beautiful colours. He seduces you with colour.

I have five Bacons now. They'll end up in the Manor [Hirst's country estate in Toddington]. I have one on the wall by the TV. I watch it more than I watch the TV. You can't not look at it. It demands your attention, pulls you in. It's just unbelievable to me that I own them.

He popped into the Saatchi once to look at my work. They called me and said, 'Bacon's been in, he was here for about an hour.' I didn't really believe them but then here's this letter he wrote to Louis Le Brocquy, the Irish painter, where he says, 'I saw this Hirst fly piece and it really worked.' I still can't quite believe it.

From an interview by Sean O'Hagan
The Guardian Observer, Sunday August 10 2008
guardian.co.uk

Francis Bacon Retrospective at Tate Britain until January 4, 2009. (It goes to Madrid's Prado from February 3 to April 19, 2009 and then to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, May 18-August 16, 2009. The question is, Where will I see it?

Be All You Can Be

BCAM at LACMA (Broad Contemporary Art Museum at Los Angeles Country Museum of Art) was a great place to be on a hot-hot-hot, as in swelt-er-ing hot day. —Unseasonably hot? Depends on what season. We're in the season of climate melt-down and so, mid-April, it was hot hot hot in LA.

The Broad Museum is the newest addition to what they are now calling the LACMA complex. Like any complex, it is a messy conglomerate of seemingly unrelated constructions—but BCAM is beautiful. I like it. It takes the cake.



First, the building. Clean, yet textured, with a goofy flip of a roof line and a red exterior escalator that takes you to the third floor. Just like an IKEA building, you start your visit from the top. Architect Renzo Piano says "I love the idea of the escalator. It's part of the almost anthropological ritual of rising up slowly. You can just stand quietly. You have time to look around and to realize what you are doing, like levitaion." I'm not sure what he means by "anthropological ritual of rising up slowly." I'm afraid he means like evolution, walking on our knuckles, then standing up straight. I hope that's not what he means. But I do like the analogy of levitation. It does feel like that (like I know). No, I mean, it feels like a soft lift in mid-air because you are out in space as you rise slowly to the top level where the view is expansive: palm trees and hills in the distance, and behind you the big mother stone building with her embrace of creativity.

Ah yes. You enter and up there at the top are two flanking grand spaces—8,500 sq feet each—with glass ceilings, no columns. Wooosh, big airy space with floating walls. Oh yeah. The glass panelled ceiling lets in soft light bouncing off sun shades—those metal roof flips. The light is extraordinary.

There's a massive red metal and glass elevator between the two big rooms. Through the glass you see the 86 foot tall, red & black piece by Barbara Kruger, Shafted. Did I mention the exterior escalator is red? Red is the accent color, just the right red to go with the creamy stone walls. This is a good-looking building—and the art is good-looking in it.



Oh yeah, the art. There's been a lot of wanking in the press about the inaugural exhibition being just big-ticket heavy hitters, the "usual suspects." Well, ye-ah. The Broads are big-money collectors of big-price-tag art, so it seems to me, they built the space (which years down the line will have housed all sorts of interesting shows) so why not showcase their collection, or the best of their amazing, eye-popping collection of contemporary American art? I mean, really, get over yourself.

I for one was happy to sail around the commodious spaces, cooling off, and taking in the excellent works by Koons, Baldassari, Ruscha, Twombly, Kelly—no I'm not going to list them all. Let's say a museum's worth of sparkling works. But I did mention Kelly—the Ellsworth Kelly room was a revelation to me. I think it was about five works that only work in person. The effect was of such searing clarity and optical engagement the like of which I never expected. More than likely in another setting I passed his work on by. Here, the paintings fairly leapt off the wall—no, more that they bore colored space into them. Hard to explain. Had to be there. This is Blue Red from 1968.



I will mention the women artists in the exhibit, there being only four. There was a Jenny Holzer installation that involved quotations on stone slabs. I mentioned the Kruger in the elevator shaft. On the second floor there was a retrospective of Cindy Sherman, 49 pieces in all, looking very much the Victorian portrait gallery. And then there was one iconic, quietly beautiful painting by Susan Rothenberg, Blue Body.



Trivia: this Spring, Rothenberg is being recognized, with her husband (I didn't know they were married. What should I know who's married to whom, but it struck me, Wha-? Really?) Bruce Nauman, by the The Santa Fe Rotary Foundation For the Arts as Distinguished Artist of the Year 2008. It's an award that goes to local lights. I guess they live thereabouts. What you learn on the internet. Agnes Martin was one. She lived there. She was a Distinguished Artist for sure.

So BCAM. What else do I want to say? I want to say Damien Hirst. Damien Hirst, Damien Hirst. Damien Hirst's cold-blooded, sterilized, and cool—cool-cat cool—art ran to two rooms. Butterflies, pharmacology, botanics and Away From the Flock, the sheep in formaldehyde. I was cooling off; now I had the chills.



And Basquiat. I really liked seeing the choice selection of Basquiat—what I mean to say is, selection of choice Basquiat, including this skull which not only is in the color-scheme of this post, but could be considered his signature piece and here it is in the Broad Collection which exemplifies what a choice collection this is, but more, brings home the point that this collection is now public. The Broads gave $60 million to LACMA to build the museum along with an arrangement to show their incredible collection of works. Wow.

Outside the museum there were Robert Irwin's palm trees, Jeff Koons tulips, and Chris Burden's Urban Light, an installation of antique lamp posts he rescued and refurbished and set up in a grid, shoulder to shoulder like. As a work of public art it is a whimsical gift to the city—a memory, no, actual, literal pieces of her past retrofitted, reworked, reimagined as a focal point, an illumined gathering together of individual beacons of light to be a community of lights. It is a sweet and humble 21st Century, West Coast answer to the torch-bearing lady of the New York harbor.



What a gift. I say, Bravo all around.


*images, except the last, courtesy of LACMA and the The Broad Art Foundation.

Sausages and Ale

So what is it about sausages?

There are 300 sausages suspended (with sheep, shark and cow) in Damien Hirst's new installation, School: The Archaeology of Lost Desires, Comprehending Infinity, and the Search for Knowledge, created for the lobby of Lever House, NYC. Meat, ground and encased, then encased yet again in formadehyde and glass.

At the Moscow Biennale this year, the Blue Noses Group showed Kitchen Suprematism, sliced salami and bread arranged into abstract compositions on a kitchen counter.

Did it all begin with Wurstserie, the 1979 Sausage Series of photographs by Peter Fischli and David Weiss? Sausages dressed up in slices of deli meats - bacon and mortadella clothing and carpets and cups: a sausage world?

Wolfgang Tillmans photographed sausages in a pot. He also photographed man meat in hand - the ol' blood sausage, turkey neck, wiener, salami, boner, sausage. So there it is: that's what it is about sausage...

Sausage takes the cake.