Things that art keeps secret from me... (1)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

20 July

With reference to Damien Hirst's exhibition at the Tate* (not an exhaustive list):

* A dozen or so of these so-called spot paintings exist, and I think that the claim is that they are all on the walls of TM

* Their titles, as TM has a mania for keeping them separated far right or far left with a long line of works in between, can therefore no longer be the jokes that Hirst must have intended for them

* For example: the link for Anthraquinonone-1-Diazonium Chloride takes you to the actual and relatively modest compound, supposedly depicted in a fairly large canvas of some 35 of these circles by 25

* Artistic uncomposition no. 7 is, perhaps, just as meaningful, but, if people could easily see these titles (rather than shuttling to the end of the room and back), would they make people believe that, in colour, Hirst has portrayed a chemical structure? (Not, I suspect, anyone who knew even a bit about chemistry...)

* And, with the two that are painted onto the wall of Rooms 2 and 3 of TM, what is their status? Do they cease to exist when scrubbed off to make room for the next show - and do we believe that, if there is a known design for them, Hirst himself painted all of the circles, and that, until he does so again (somewhere else) they won't exist?

* I call them 'circles', because they are circles, and often too big to be spots

* It is also not an illusion - the cicles are not 'equal to the size of the spaces between each [circle]'**, but the inter-circle spaces are often appreciably bigger

* Not to mention Iodomethane - 13c, foolishly represented by a fold-out in the catalogue, when the original must be around 15 metres long, with many a circle, and no meaningful connection (unless Hirst was high on this substance during its creation) with the scale of the painting
* The room steward whom I asked, although very friendly and helpful, had to suggest asking the curators by filling in a form: had it been Hirst's intention, I wondered, to ensure that - because the dissected cow in her two halves was in the way - it was not possible to see the whole painting, except by standing at either end and looking across, which then introduced effects of patterning caused by bunching, the nearer that the circles were to the other end


Continued in Things that art keep secret from me... (2)


End-notes

* Or, rather, the exhibition at Tate Modern of works by DH.

** Circles separated by a distance equal to their circumference.


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