Subway, 1969, Richard Estes, Oil on canvas, 42 x 60

Escalator, 1970, Richard Estes, Oil on canvas,

42½ x 62

P

 

E

 

T

 

A

 

 

 

 

The Elusive Truth of Not Getting Away with Murder and the Kiss of Death

Damien Hirst at Gagosian Gallery by Kalitan Jagvonjeul

"The sun does not rise in the east one day and in the west the next day.”   Christopher Hitchens

The absurd denial of the truth is natural in man. Man does not want to be, but appear to be. He does not want to see what he is, but tries only to see himself as the person other people take him for, when they talk about him.  

Svami Prajnanpad

There is no elusive truth of the fact that Richard Estes’ work is unique among the photo realists, he uses more than a single photo, he uses two or three.  Richard Estes painted a picture, entitled “Subway” in 1963, oil on canvas.  The interior of a subway train. An underground passageway, or corridor of time, stillness and movement.

“Hospital Corridor” 2004

It is ironic that the word corridor actually comes from the Latin word curere, which means to run.

If one thinks about this, corridors are impediments of movement and also waiting places for hovering and dilly dallying.  They are the veins and architectural meridians for the long passage of time.  They can be places of acoustical echoes and music and distempering scenes of violence, running or escaping.  A corridor is neither a public or a private place; it is a nowhere land and a linier time tunnel.  We have all experienced sitting in a corridor outside a doctor’s office, waiting to be seen, one is then visible and invisible simultaneously.  It is like sitting in a wheelchair on a busy street. It exposes one to the evacuation of being enclosed and exposed. Corridors are hesitation zones and places of vulnerability, where disjointed ghosts eternally walk and haunt.  Where disobedient children and pathetic executives have to stand and wait to be reprimanded.  Where the anxious father paces up and down the maternity ward.  Or for waiting in a hospital stretcher dying to be seen by weary doctors who do not see or hear.  In some instances, a place for agonizing reflection, joyous anticipation and devastating contemplation of waiting for life signs in the corridor of an intensive care unit.Corridors can be nightmares in the mind and eternal soul..

Emily Dickinson wrote:

One need not be a chamber to be haunted One needs not a house The brain has corridors surpassing

Material place

Damien Hirst’s “Hospital Corridor” painting is a masterpiece of photorealistic execution of an anxiety provoking atmospheric representation of a hospital corridor.  This piece is sensitive and subtle and not sensationalist seeking or shocking and is an affirmative step in the right direction for Mr. Hirst.   This extraordinary painting is a passageway of purgatory and sadness and whispers leading to a depiction of suffering, resigned desperation, hope, death. heaven, hell and nirvana. A brutally realistic landscape of urine yellow mopped & buffered Lysol disinfected floor & claustrophobic stained tile ceiling, blinding fluorescent lights & non-descriptive abstract paintings hanging on sanatorium fecal light brown pastel hospital gallery walls. At the end of this tunnel is a red potted plant and a sunlit window of hope.

The two most visually dazzling paintings are "cut gem stones" and "minerals". These two alone steal the show and are worth the trip to Gagosian Gallery. Simply Drop Dead Gorgeous.

Kalitan Jagvonjeul

The lamp is empty

the oil is used up

The tambourine is dead

The dancer lies down

The fire is out

and no smokes rises from it

The soul is absorbed into the unique

and there is no longer duality

Kabir.

"LABOR ISN'T WORKING"

 Charles Saatchi

Hospital Corridor, 2004, by Damien Hirst
Oil on canvas
78 x 136-1/2 inches (198.1 x 346.7 cm)

Minerals, 2002-2003, by Damien Hirst
Oil and acrylic on canvas
72 x 89 inches (182.9 x 226.1 cm)

When water joins with water,

it is not a meeting but a unification.

Svami Prajnanpad

 

"THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON PAUSE"  Excerpts of

Michael Kimmelman's Review in the New York Times.

The shows opening galvanized the predictable mob of ebullient celebrities and tut tutting rubber neckers. They cheerfully congregated before paintings of car bombings and a monkey receiving an injection in the face.

The YBAs were, and are, a diverse group, their linkage really just a marketing ploy by their prime collector, Charles Saatchi.

Mr Hirst's was the groups natural front man. He had talent, and he had his act down. He was buoyant and a canny entrepreneur and impresario., a savvy scavenger of art history with a nose for fashion and publicity.

Mr. Hirst's was a love it or leave it cocktail of death, celebrity, sex and technology, heavily spiked with comic promotion. The work was at heart about money, or about the love affair between art and money.

His vulgar, macabre delirium was awful, but almost endearing. Mr. Hirst had just enough panache to charm fence sitters and keep detractors off balance.

Mr. Hirst's new show has reportedly sold out and his new paintings were said to be priced at two million dollars a piece.

The purity of life is the highest and the most authentic art to follow.Mahatma Gandhi

Every man has an equal right to the necessities of life, even as birds and beasts do.Mahatma Gandhi

The Foundation for  the

Advancement of Art

"9/11 WICKED BUT A  WORK OF ART", SAYS DAMIEN HIRST

One year after the tragic event one of the leading and most famous postmodern artists, Damien Hirst, of dissected cow fame, has said 9/11 was art.   Cutting courtesy of The Arts Journal:

HIRST - 9/11 WAS "ART":

Controversial artist Damien Hirst told the BBC yesterday that the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center were a work of art. "The thing about 9/11 is that it's kind of an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually." Describing the image of the hijacked planes crashing into the twin towers as "visually stunning", he added: "You've got to hand it to them on some level because they've achieved something which nobody would have ever have thought possible, especially to a country as big as America." The Guardian (UK) 09/11/02

 

One of its defining characteristics of postmodern art has been to "shock" the audience, as when Marcel Duchamp attempted when he submitted a urinal to Society for Independent Artists in

New York in 1917.  Using the concept of shock aesthetics on can grasp how 9/11 could be viewed as postmodern art.

Prophetically, immediately after the 9/11 tragedy I saw the connection between it and postmodern art.  In December 200, issue #49, of the Free Radical, I state: " It is a sick  irony of massive proportions that America, through its network of  museums, dealers, intelligentsia, and funding, is the world's leading exponent of postmodern art...The symbol for this aspect of her culture and equally well for the terrorists is the bloody formless waste that was the World Trade Center and its people. A symbolic and literal marking of the decline of a civilization." Terrorism and Postmodern Art

Michael Newberry
Director Foundation for the Advancement of Art: