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拍品专文
Executed in 2013, the present work formed part of Damien Hirst’s extraordinary exhibition Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable at the Punta della Dogana, Venice in 2017. Undoubtedly one of the artist’s most ambitious projects, the landmark show presented a spectacular trove of treasures supposedly salvaged from the shipwreck of Apistos—an ancient boat which foundered and sunk off the coast of East Africa in the late first century AD. According to Hirst’s apocryphal story, the collection had belonged to Cif Amotan II, a freedman from Antioch. Amotan—whose name forms an anagram for ‘I am fiction’—was described as the ‘paragon of a collector’ in the exhibition’s catalogue: ‘he collected not only artworks, precious stones, curios and specimens of natural history, but also spices from faraway countries, acclimated birds, exotic flowers and a tamed bestiary’ (H. Loyrette, quoted in D. Hirst, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, exh. cat. Palazzo Grassi, Punta della Dogana, Venice 2017, p. 14). Here, we are presented with art history’s most timeless artefact: the female nude. Silhouetted with an impossibly accentuated waist, pert breasts, and arched back, the monumental bronze figure bears the stamp of the American toy conglomerate responsible for Barbie: ‘© 1999 Mattel. Inc. CHINA’.
Grecian Nude follows a rich trajectory of works in Hirst’s conceptual oeuvre—from gleaming medicine cabinets to formaldehyde shark tanks—which address the complex relationship between art and truth. The feigned discovery of the Apistos wreckage was corroborated with a range of ‘evidence’, including an accompanying Netflix documentary, and a vivid written account by French underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio. Blurring fact and fiction, the ill-fated ship’s name itself translated to ‘Unbelievable’ in Koine Greek. Buried in the depths of the Indian Ocean for over two thousand years, the hoard of recovered items—including ancient effigies, Aztec calendar stones, Egyptian carvings and fossils of mythical creatures—were intricately simulated, encrusted with lichenous coral, barnacles and seaweed. The exhibition’s catalogue contained an inventory. ‘The multiple versions of the nudes’, it stated, ‘are symptomatic of the classical predilection for forms that lent themselves to seriality, a trend that contradicts the modern fetishisation of the original’ (D. Hirst, ibid., p. 320).
The nude female form is indeed one that has been serially reproduced. Hirst’s Grecian Nude conjures a genealogical line of the venerated art-historical convention and its archetypes, evoking Cycladic female idols, voluptuous stone-carved fertility sculptures, and copies of the lost Aphrodites and Venuses of antiquity. One from an edition of three, the bronze sculpture also nods to classical architectural caryatids—with their replicated, standardised forms—and in more recent history, Surrealist mannequins and dolls. Positing the exaggerated Barbie model as the genre’s contemporary iteration, Hirst elides a timeless paradigm with transient pop culture trends. Assuming the appearance of ancient relic with its dismembered arms and head, the figure incidentally reveals itself to be a product of mass-production, propagating ever-shifting standards of female beauty. Confronting deeper questions of authenticity, uniqueness, and singularity—virtues that are indisputably fetishised in Western art—Hirst continues the legacy of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, Walter Benjamin’s seminal text The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and Andy Warhol’s soup cans.
Grecian Nude follows a rich trajectory of works in Hirst’s conceptual oeuvre—from gleaming medicine cabinets to formaldehyde shark tanks—which address the complex relationship between art and truth. The feigned discovery of the Apistos wreckage was corroborated with a range of ‘evidence’, including an accompanying Netflix documentary, and a vivid written account by French underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio. Blurring fact and fiction, the ill-fated ship’s name itself translated to ‘Unbelievable’ in Koine Greek. Buried in the depths of the Indian Ocean for over two thousand years, the hoard of recovered items—including ancient effigies, Aztec calendar stones, Egyptian carvings and fossils of mythical creatures—were intricately simulated, encrusted with lichenous coral, barnacles and seaweed. The exhibition’s catalogue contained an inventory. ‘The multiple versions of the nudes’, it stated, ‘are symptomatic of the classical predilection for forms that lent themselves to seriality, a trend that contradicts the modern fetishisation of the original’ (D. Hirst, ibid., p. 320).
The nude female form is indeed one that has been serially reproduced. Hirst’s Grecian Nude conjures a genealogical line of the venerated art-historical convention and its archetypes, evoking Cycladic female idols, voluptuous stone-carved fertility sculptures, and copies of the lost Aphrodites and Venuses of antiquity. One from an edition of three, the bronze sculpture also nods to classical architectural caryatids—with their replicated, standardised forms—and in more recent history, Surrealist mannequins and dolls. Positing the exaggerated Barbie model as the genre’s contemporary iteration, Hirst elides a timeless paradigm with transient pop culture trends. Assuming the appearance of ancient relic with its dismembered arms and head, the figure incidentally reveals itself to be a product of mass-production, propagating ever-shifting standards of female beauty. Confronting deeper questions of authenticity, uniqueness, and singularity—virtues that are indisputably fetishised in Western art—Hirst continues the legacy of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, Walter Benjamin’s seminal text The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and Andy Warhol’s soup cans.