Modern Art- A Critical Introduction

Helloooo,

A Critical introduction traces the historical and contemporary contexts for understanding modern art movements, and the theories that influenced and attempted to explain them. Its radical approach foregoes the chronological approach to art movements in favor of looking at the ways in which art has been understood.

In this post I will investigate the main developments in art interpretation and draw examples from a wide range of genres including painting, sculpture, photography, installation and performance art. 

Second week into my Art History course and I've come across many contemporary artists that I will critically analyse over the week (I will agree to disagree with anyone that doesn't favor my opinions: remember this is a public blog all criticism welcome.) 

Damien Hirst- 'Forms without Life' (1991)

‘Forms Without Life’ and ‘Life Without You’ are two early works incorporating different presentations of sea shells. Hirst originally intended them for inclusion in ‘Internal Affairs’, a series dating from 1991 shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Eventually, however, ‘Forms Without Life’ and ‘Life Without You’ were excluded from the auto-biographical series because he felt they were “too beautiful. Or the shells are anyway...

The piece characterizes an exhibition which asks us to play with the instabilities and openness of meaning, going beyond the surface to examine the multifarious range of unexpected interpretations gauged from a work of art.

Hirst’s quietly brutal commentary on mortality confounds. 'Life Without You' is nothing more than a simple ordering of beautiful shells on a table, yet the underlying sense of the transience of love seeps silently in.

Correct me if i'm wrong but my first impression of this piece was that it was a modern day context of curiosity; which made me believe that it associated itself with life beyond forms, such as habitat, purpose and protection. A form that holds life in relation to the shells at this present day.

Here's me babbling on quite a bit but I also thought that 'Life without you' was also afflicted with taking it out of its own world and bringing it into our own for our own desires and pleasures. Meaning that not only is this a pretty preservation of shells but that Hirst did this because he says and I quote "I like them because they once contained life." 

At first I thought how is this interpreted as art or a sculpture installation for that matter. Then once I started looking into what each object on the shelf could symbolize, it then became clear in discussion that it was assocated with a picturesque form of life that was once there. 

I must admit I'm not exactly a fan of Hirst's work but his interpretation of the "unacceptable idea of death" the experiences served to establish the difficulties he perceived in reconciling the idea of death in life. Of the prominence of death in his work (‘A Thousand Years’ (1990)) he has explained: “You can frighten people with death or an idea of their own mortality, or it can actually give them vigor."

I experienced this sculpture in 2012 at Damien Hirst's exhibition at Tate Modern in 2012. My first thought on this piece was vulgar. But obviously as I was open minded I looked into what his whole purpose into creating this and what his thoughts were at the time. 

In both works, the vitrine is split in half by a glass wall: a hole in this partition allows newly hatched flies from a box reminiscent of a die in one half, to fly into the other where an Insect-O-Cutor hangs. The corpses of the flies inside the vitrine accumulate whilst the works are on exhibition. In ‘A Thousand Years’, a decaying cow’s head is presented beneath the fly-killer. 

Hirst describes how, having come round to the idea of the validity of “new art” and having made the spot paintings and the ‘Medicine Cabinets’, he felt he had lost something, “in terms of the belief I had in whether [art] was real or not.” 

Feeling the need to make “something about something important”, and having already worked with flies, maggots and butterflies, whilst at Goldsmiths, he decided to create a “life cycle in a box.” The structure was partially inspired by American minimalism and the industrial materials Hirst had seen in the work of Grenville Davey and Tony Cragg. The shape of the vitrine drew from Francis Bacon’s technique of framing his figures within box shapes. Of the influence of Bacon’s frames to his work, Hirst has explained: “it’s a doorway, it’s a window; it’s two-dimensional, it’s three-dimensional; he’s thinking about the glass reflecting.”

Although admitting to having a “Frankenstein moment” of horror at the death of the flies, the use of living creatures enabled Hirst to incorporate an element of movement into the works. After studying Naum Gabo, Hirst found that the flies successfully satisfied his ambition to “suspend things without strings or wires and have them constantly change pattern in space”.

References: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/damien-hirst 

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/apr/02/damien-hirst-tate-review