That joke isn't funny any more
Damien Hirst's enemies have often accused him of repeating himself as an artist. His new show suggests he has slipped into self-parody, says Adrian Searle
Too much... two of the works in Damien Hirst's first museum survey at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli: The Agony and the Ecstasy (top), and Beautiful Revolving Sphincter Oops Brown Painting
Adrian Searle
@SearleAdrian
Tue 11 Jan 2005 09.54 EST
The flies are buzzing, and lapping up the blood leaking from the decapitated cow's head. They're shitting and dying, and floating round their grubby universe in a vitrine - nasty little dots in space, surrounded, on the walls of the room, by more dots, the brightly coloured spots of Damien Hirst's paintings. To the flies, with their multifaceted eyes, these are the stars and moons in distant orbit. The spots, like all Hirst's paintings, come large and small, in every colour except purple. They are positioned evenly in a grid, the spaces between the dots always equal to their diameter.
The spots loom and recede, jostle and stay flat. The eye bounces about among them - on small paintings with fewer, bigger spots, and on a long frieze-like painting with thousands of smaller spots, on in-between-size paintings with in-between numbers of spots. Each painting is specific and different, but they are all also generic, as much alike as they are dissimilar.
Seeing lots together is an interesting, stimulating experience. The paintings are very clean. But the double vitrine with the cow's head leaking blood and all the flies is filthy with droppings and the dead. The conjunction of all these different-sized paintings and their different-sized and coloured dots, and the vitrine, as well as the stars decorating the barrel-vaulted ceiling of the room, is eerie, peculiar and memorable. I've seen these things before, but not like this. This room, I know, is going to stay with me.
This is the best room in Damien Hirst's first museum survey show, at the National Archeological Museum in Naples, which runs until the end of this month. An odd show in an unlikely place, it is none the less a chance to see Hirst's work away from all the overheated attention the artist gets in London. It has become difficult to look at Damien Hirst. There is too much background noise and chatter, too much reputation to be got over. It is good for me, too, to see Hirst out of the clutches of Charles Saatchi, away from all the discussion of Goldsmiths College in the late 1980s and the rise of the Young British Artists, away from London's White Cube and New York's Gagosian Gallery, away from the Londoner's Diary gossip and all the hype. Never mind that Naples' buses have been given Damien Hirst butterfly paint jobs.
Hirst's development has been consistent from the start, and some might even say stalled from the beginning. He was making dot paintings, directly on the wall rather than on canvas, for the Freeze show in Docklands in 1988. His degree show the following year (I was an external examiner at Goldsmiths at the time) was an elegant display of medicine cabinets. Here we are again, 15 years on, looking at dot paintings and medicine cabinets, filled giant ashtrays and butterfly paintings, vitrines and surgical implements and the rest of his impedimenta. He can't escape his history, and nor can we.
The Naples show has given the artist the opportunity to juxtapose newer works with old, to make new conjunctions and to restage the various aspects of his work in a satisfying way. The lengthy interview with Hirst that takes up most of the catalogue has also been an opportunity to dig deeper into his thinking than has been done before. Both are chances that the artist has, to an extent, fumbled. There is a really strong show of Hirst to be made, but this - mostly - isn't it. Too many vitrines, too many spin paintings, too much of everything: once again, he has crammed too much in. For an artist so concerned with the menace and density of each work, Hirst has an unerring way of defeating this by meaningless repetition, and by arranging his works in such a cluttered manner that drama, for the most part, is lost. His vitrines, with their tableaux of objects, are often over-occupied too. Maybe this is his idea of artistic generosity.
Or is it just that the shocks don't shock any more? Even the Insect-O-Cutor in his A Thousand Years seems to have given up insectocuting. The flies have started dancing along the electrified wires, so blase are they about life, risk and death. But that's flies for you. Those little black corpses piled up beneath aren't dead at all. They're having a sleepover under the ultraviolet light. Adam and Eve on their gurneys have been sedated beyond caring, even though lots of gristly bits seem to have been snipped out of Adam's rib, sprinkled about like so many spilled pork scratchings.
But Hirst never really meant to shock, in any case. He has meant to disturb and make us think, and to make memorable images. What more can any artist want? Instead, however, he appears to be trapped in his own career, like one of those phantom, absent figures inside his own vitrines. You could say the same about Francis Bacon, with his squirming men inside their painted space frames. The vitrine and the space frame point back to Adolf Eichmann in his sealed dock at his war crimes trial, to the Pope in his Pope-mobile, and to the boxy structures and icy displays of minimal and post- minimal art - to Donald Judd and Robert Morris, Robert Smithson and Bruce Nauman. Hirst's language, like Jeff Koons's, homes in on the very theatricality that the critic Michael Fried once decried in minimal art.
But I feel I've seen enough boxes and heard enough cliches about the human condition, all that guff about cutting beneath the superficial skin of reality to reveal the festering sores beneath which plague modern man in his plight, blah, blah, blah. That stuff doesn't work any more, and maybe Hirst knows how empty it is. One of his more recent works is an enlarged, sculpted and painted model of a great chunk of flesh, a section through the strata of epidermis and subcutaneous layers to the muscles beneath. Hairs sprout like cartoon shark fins. Clogged follicles remind us of nearby Vesuvius. It is a daft-looking thing: part sci-fi tomb, part chunk of scarily decorated Neapolitan ice cream, or a madder version of an Eduardo Paolozzi sculpture.
I have always taken Hirst seriously, but much of what he now does seems like portentous heavy breathing. He has descended into bathos and self-parody - the male and female skeletons surrounded by row upon row of surgical paraphernalia, called Endgame, and the work called Where Are We Going? Where Do We Come From? Is There a Reason? How can he hope not to be laughed at? The answers, in any case, are, in order: nowhere fast, Goldsmiths College and no. The title may hark back to Gauguin, but is more likely to remind us of an old Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch. The work itself is a vitrine display of animal skeletons - snakes, birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals, including one or two impossible hybrids, culminating with a human skull and a tiny foetus in a little plastic jar. The thing is, I find myself fascinated by the bones and forget about any artistic pretensions this cabinet of curiosities might have.
Hirst's show occupies a number of rooms along one side of an inner courtyard, including a very large space from which the museum's main staircase ascends. Although not currently on show, among the highlights of the museum are the body casts of those who died when Pompeii was destroyed in AD79. Covered in falling ash and a rain of lava, Pompeii's dead inhabitants left cavities in the solidifying rock where they lay, accidental moulds from which many casts have been made since the city was rediscovered. Some of these are also on display at Pompeii, crouching, curled in attitudes of self-protection, screaming, dead where they lay. There are even casts of dead dogs. These casts, now displayed on shelves alongside jumbles of amphorae, and in spindly-legged vitrines in the houses and baths of the town, are infinitely touching, as one peers through the grubby glass to these perfectly preserved, isolated traces of human beings in the moment of excruciating death. They are not art (though in the 1990s American artist Allan McCollum recast some of the town dogs for a work of his own), but they say more than any of Hirst's little theatres of mortality.
In fact, much of Hirst's art appears irrelevant beside them. His inventions cannot compete with reality, even when he blurs the distinction, as so much art tries to do. His best work happened when he knew less about what he was doing, and he wasn't so caught up in the machinery of large-scale factory production and operatic conceits. His high points came early in his career, when the territory was still wide open for him, before he became Damien Hirst. He needs to give himself a break.
· Damien Hirst is at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples, until January 31. Details: 00 39 8488 00288.