Damien Hirst and the Legacy of the Sublime in Contemporary Art and Culture
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Middlesex University Research Repository An open access repository of Middlesex University research http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk White, Luke ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7080-7243 (2009) Damien Hirst and the legacy of the sublime in contemporary art and culture. PhD thesis, Middlesex University. [Thesis] Final accepted version (with author’s formatting) This version is available at: https://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/4282/ Copyright: Middlesex University Research Repository makes the University’s research available electronically. Copyright and moral rights to this work are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners unless otherwise stated. The work is supplied on the understanding that any use for commercial gain is strictly forbidden. A copy may be downloaded for personal, non-commercial, research or study without prior permission and without charge. 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See also repository copyright: re-use policy: http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/policies.html#copy 1 Damien Hirst and the Legacy of the Sublime in Contemporary Art and Culture A thesis submitted to Middlesex University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Luke White Middlesex University School of Arts and Education March 2009 Electronic copy, for upload to the Middlesex University Research Repository, March 2010. Illustrations have been removed. The author asserts his copyright over this material. For further information, please contact the author by email: [email protected] or [email protected] 2 Abstract Damien Hirst’s work, complicit as it is in a capitalist culture industry, is in need of analysis as cultural symptom. Though best understood not as avant-garde art, but as commodified culture, at its best it condenses social contradiction into complex, haunting images. In doing this it draws on a continuing tradition of the “commodified sublime” with roots in early modernity. The nachträglich returns of this in his work present an alternative history of the sublime to its high-cultural narratives. My presentation of an archive of this capitalist sublime focuses on the eighteenth century, but ranges widely, finding traces of it in sources as various as Alexander Pope and the Scriblerians, Bertolt Brecht, John Singleton Copley, James Thomson, Bruegel the Elder, Piranesi, Wordsworth, Spielberg, Mary Shelley and Zola. A starting point for my investigation is Lyotard’s “The Sublime and the Avant- Garde,” a central resource for the repeated judgments on the sublime within art-critical discussions of Hirst. But although Lyotard seems at first to oppose the sublime to the temporal logic of capitalism, his essay reveals sublimity as deeply implicated in capitalist culture, problematising its use as a valorizing term. Central for me in historicising this insight are Pope’s satires on the commercialisation of culture, the Dunciad and Peri Bathous, which already attempt to divide “sublimity” from worthless consumer culture. Pope, however, is himself motivated by the use of Longinus in early-eighteenth-century commercial literature. Colley Cibber, for example, a recurring target of satire for Pope, strikingly prefigures Hirst. They share an ironisation of the sublime which I argue suggests a relation between the sublime and the strategies of Camp. I discuss Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) in terms of its activation of an archive of shark representations. The shark repeatedly serves as a displaced image of capital’s “inhuman” rapacity. In Hirst’s sculpture it provides an ecstatic phantasy of capital’s global reach, a phantasy inherent in the commodity form, but which reverses into the phantasy of being objectified by capital. I propose the Hirstean sublime marks the return of the disavowed violence inherent to capital. The sublime forms in the imaginary of capital and serves to form that imaginary. Placing this relationship between the sublime and capital at its centre, mine is a broadly Marxian project. In the Hirstean sublime I pursue a (phantasmagorically haunted) representational logic peculiar to capitalism – especially forms of capitalism dominated by finance capital, such as our own moment and the early eighteenth century. 3 Acknowledgements I would like in particular to thank my supervisors Adrian Rifkin and Suzannah Biernoff, for challenging me and encouraging me in making this a much more interesting piece of work than it would otherwise have been. Much that is good in this thesis is thanks to their input, and all the faults my own. Thanks also to my Mum and Dad for all the support they have given me through this process (and through my education in general), and for the many friends and colleagues – too numerous to list – with whom I have discussed the work, and who have generally put up with me throughout its production. This work was made possible through a Research Studentship bursary from Middlesex University. 4 Contents List of Illustrations ........................................................................................................5 Introduction .................................................................................................................12 Part 1: Damien Hirst and the Contemporary Sublime Ch. 1. The Sublime in Contemporary Criticism .....................................................66 Ch. 2. The New and the Now ....................................................................................98 Ch. 3. Capitalism and the Sublime .........................................................................128 Interlude 1: Picturing Capital ..................................................................................150 Part 2: Damien Hirst in the Eighteenth Century? Ch. 4. Sublimity, Bathos and Dulness ....................................................................173 Ch. 5. Damien Hirst and Colley Cibber .................................................................225 Interlude 2: The Sublime in the Butcher’s Shop Window ...................................268 Ch. 6. “Und der Haifisch”: Hirst’s Shark as an image of Capital .........................296 Ch. 7. Phantasies of Capital in Hirst’s Physical Impossibility ...............................353 Conclusion .................................................................................................................395 Works Cited ................................................................................................................410 5 List of Illustrations Fig. 1: Installation view of the exhibition Freeze ...........................................................8 Fig. 2: Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Liv- ing, 1991. ......................................................................................................................11 Fig. 3: Arginosuccinic Acid, 1995, with Partial Thromboplastin, 2004. ......................14 Fig. 4: In and Out of Love, 1991. ..................................................................................14 Fig. 5: Bodies, 1989. .....................................................................................................17 Fig. 6: The Fate of Man, 2005. .....................................................................................19 Fig. 7: The Sacred Heart, 2005. ....................................................................................19 Fig. 8: Sarah Lucas, Sod You Gits, 1990 .......................................................................21 Fig. 9: Mat Collishaw, Bullet Hole, 1888-93. ...............................................................21 Fig. 10: Mother and Child Divided, 1993. ....................................................................24 Fig. 11: Away from the Flock, 1994. .............................................................................27 Fig. 12: I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, 1991. ........................................................................................27 Fig. 13: Where Are we Going? Where Do we Come From? Is there a Reason? 2000-4 .......................................................................................................................................31 Fig. 14: Cummings, cartoon. Times Magazine, 11 May 1996. .....................................33 Fig. 15: “Lady and the Wimp,” cartoon, Time Out, 15-22 November 1995. ................33 Fig. 16: Steve Bell, “If,” cartoon strips, Guardian, 1 - 12 May 1995. ..........................33 Fig. 17: Philip James De Loutherbourg,