.jpg?w=1)
拍品专文
Striking in its allover, grid pattern, each circular form, a spot ingrained in the imagination, insistent in its iterative modernist formal presentation, Dicaprin extends Damien Hirst's interest in serial composition, his Pharmaceutical Paintings, from their conception in 1991 to their iterations almost twenty years on. Drug therapies, a simulacrum for immortality, are thematically foundational for Hirst's work, rehearsed and reimagined in various configurations. The sly presentation of drugs as art, similarly seductive and illusory, creates for Hirst a conundrum not easily solved: 'I can't understand why some people believe completely in medicine and not in art...?" (D. Hirst, I Want to Spend the Rest of my Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, London 1997, p. 9).
Interpretations of Hirst's system have ranged from ironizing art historical paradigms, such as the modernist grid, the notion of authorship and appropriation, to the universal human conundrum of life and death. Even more specifically, Hirst assaults the commodity culture of pharmaceuticals. Hirst's cool simulation of the Duchampian readymade, in this case, of tablets used in the therapy of Leiner's disease, a rare form of skin scaling in infants, and in therapies for people suffering from seborrheic dermatitis, often HIV/AIDS victims whose risk for the disease is greater, functions as an analogue to the seriality of commodity culture. Hirst's Pharmaceuticals convey a systematic reenactment of consumption, by which brands, in this case Dicaprin, supercede use, the sign of differentiation of products preempting their actual use value: Dicaprin is as much a sign as it is a product.
Hirst has created a fictitious construct, a mechanical system that simulates the aura of the artist's hand. Hirst is on to the notion that his artwork stands in for the commodity culture which it overtly performs: 'I started them as an endless series," Hirst has said, 'a scientific approach to painting in a similar way to the drug companies' scientific approach to life." (D. Hirst, ibid., p. 246.) The distinction between high and low, art and product is erased, and yet this equivalence is not without meaning. While the artists has referred to them as "perfectly dumb painting," they are 'absolutely right." He enjoys them as exuberant and pleasing-visual candy- as optical pleasure and addictive habit, and this meaning, specific rather than random, makes the work itself aesthetically compelling, from its radiating color, to the effect of its kinetic energy.
Interpretations of Hirst's system have ranged from ironizing art historical paradigms, such as the modernist grid, the notion of authorship and appropriation, to the universal human conundrum of life and death. Even more specifically, Hirst assaults the commodity culture of pharmaceuticals. Hirst's cool simulation of the Duchampian readymade, in this case, of tablets used in the therapy of Leiner's disease, a rare form of skin scaling in infants, and in therapies for people suffering from seborrheic dermatitis, often HIV/AIDS victims whose risk for the disease is greater, functions as an analogue to the seriality of commodity culture. Hirst's Pharmaceuticals convey a systematic reenactment of consumption, by which brands, in this case Dicaprin, supercede use, the sign of differentiation of products preempting their actual use value: Dicaprin is as much a sign as it is a product.
Hirst has created a fictitious construct, a mechanical system that simulates the aura of the artist's hand. Hirst is on to the notion that his artwork stands in for the commodity culture which it overtly performs: 'I started them as an endless series," Hirst has said, 'a scientific approach to painting in a similar way to the drug companies' scientific approach to life." (D. Hirst, ibid., p. 246.) The distinction between high and low, art and product is erased, and yet this equivalence is not without meaning. While the artists has referred to them as "perfectly dumb painting," they are 'absolutely right." He enjoys them as exuberant and pleasing-visual candy- as optical pleasure and addictive habit, and this meaning, specific rather than random, makes the work itself aesthetically compelling, from its radiating color, to the effect of its kinetic energy.