egyptology anew: damien hirst, ancient egypt and the big money
JOHN MATEER
I think you have begun with the final act, my dear. Lucian Freud to Damien Hirst
THE STORY Everyone knows the story of the Golden Calf. Moses had been summoned up Mount Sinai in what is still now far eastern Egypt, and while he is gone the Children of Israel start questioning their faith. Feeling that it might be safest to return to the religion of the country they’d just left, a call is made for the gold jewellery the women had carried with them. From the metal an idol is fashioned that they worship, until Moses, descending the mountain
catches sight of them, throwing down the stone tablets bearing the recently received Ten Commandments. As every child who has attended Sunday School knows, this is a lesson about behaviour in the absence of the Father, about the temptation to indulge in the familiar instead of trusting in the imminence of the moral. Of course, that it is a calf is key—the idol is not even of a human-like god! It is this story that the provocative artist Damien Hirst was more than alluding to when he showed a sculpture of that name in his now infamous, straight-to-auction exhibition Beautiful in my Head Forever; more
than alluding, because the entire event was as excessive as it could be, using all the tricks of shock and strategy that he had learn over the course of his two decades as the enfant terrible of the Young British Art movement.1 The two- day auction resulted in sales over £111 million. Even the automation of the financial industry seemed part of the excess of this event, with the collapse of the global economy, precipitated by the losses of various USA banks, beginning, literally, the next day. The centrepiece of this uncanny auction, which even included a kind of unicorn, was Hirst’s The Golden Calf. In a later monograph a critic wrote:
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At the centre of this unifying sensibility was The Golden Calf—a formalehyde- dipped bull, whose horns and hooves were cast in 18-carat gold and whose head was topped with a solid-gold disc. While the work directly referenced the Bible, its effect could be likened to Ancient Minoan or Assyrian sculpture.2
Undoubtedly intended for the cameras, to be an icon of the entire bizarre venture of the auction, The Golden Calf was also a kind of tabloid-friendly admission of guilt—Hirst, it could seem, was parodying his own greed and parodying the entire high-end artworld. He was cashing out just before the walls of Casino Capitalism were about to come down. Even the name he gave to the auction Beautiful in my Head Forever echoes the live-fast-die- young aesthetic he shares with the other art- stars of his generation, among them Tracey Emin, the Chapman Brothers, Sue Noble and Tim Webster. In the midst of this bizarre theatre something else was going on. This particular incarnation of the Golden Calf was not as “random” as it seemed. Certainly it was not as random as its description by the above critic, who was writing in the book accompanying Hirst’s first and vast retrospective at his exhibition at Tate Modern, which was sponsored solely by the Qatar Museums Authority,3 and on for the duration of the London Olympics, later travelling to Doha.4 The critic was not alone in failing to realise that Hirst’s Golden Calf was in fact a gilded version of one of the most famous images of Ancient Egypt, the Apis Bull. He was not alone in that, as I haven’t found a single text that has remarked on the iconology of Hirst’s work. Despite the extreme obviousness of almost every aspect of Beautiful in my Head Forever, excepting perhaps the logic of the purchasers, it appears no-one was looking at the sculpture itself, nor asking whether the object was suggestive of something beyond the either-or reactions of the mediatised event. Hirst’s ability to be divisive was so successful that contemplation, something usually synonymous with art, was completely forgotten.
EARLIER PAINTINGS As an allegory of the human tendency to return to familiar, material patterns of thinking instead of adhering to the immaterial laws, the Golden Calf has long been a popular tale and subject
for artists. Perhaps the paintings that most famously depict the scene of the worshipping of the Golden Calf—even if the nature of worship is unclear in Biblical accounts—are Claude Lorrain’s Landscape with the Adoration of the Golden Calf (1653) in the Manchester Art Gallery and Nicholas Poussin’s Adoration of the Golden Calf (1636-37) in London’s National Gallery. These works, both housed in major British museums couldn’t have been unknown to Hirst. In comparing them, it is clear that both Lorrain and Poussin made very particular decisions —“readings” we might say—in creating the iconicity of their golden calves. Lorrain’s small idol on a plinth reveals a due consideration of the origin of the gold, even as it creates an ideal, classical scene: the statue is small enough to allow us to imagine that it might have been formed out of bits of metal gathered from the Israelities. Whereas Poussin’s calf, standing on a substantial plinth like a Greco-Roman sculpture, while in the foreground the Israelites dance around in a light-hearted bacchanal, is almost an hallucination of gold, a figure of imagined excess. How could that have been made while Moses was up the mountain! The work derives its composition, in part, from a 1519 fresco of the same name by the school of Raphael in the Vatican. The resemblance Poussin’s calf bears to Hirst’s sculpture and to the Apis Bull is what led me to the subject of this investigation. Why had no-one remarked on the possibility that Hirst’s The Golden Calf originated in an image from Ancient Egypt? I wondered why it was that Poussin had based his idol on the well-known Egyptian god, why he had figured the bull quite specifically and yet had refrained from placing a sign of the moon on its head. It is that lunar sign referring to the cult figure that makes Hirst’s work an irrefutable evocation of that Egyptian tradition. Of course, the iconicity of Ancient Egyptian art needn’t be immediately apparent to everyone who sees Hirst’s work. Yet it is extraordinary, considering the amount of public attention given to his Golden Calf, that even the authors of commissioned texts for substantial books on his work failed to consider its lineage, it specificity.
THE APIS BULL The Apis Bull was first discovered by a French archaeologist in Serapeum, Saqqara, in 1850. There were several cults dedicated to gods who took their earthly form as bulls, but it
was the Apis cult that was most widespread and important, having its heyday in the late Dynastic (664-332 BC) and Ptolemaic periods (332-304 BC), and lasting until 365 AD.5 There were two other major bull cults: Mnevis, the sacred animal of the god of Heliopolis, and Buchis of Armant, an animal connected to the Gods Ra and Montu. Some Egyptologists see the origin of these cults in earlier fertility worship. In the case of the Apis Bull, it is believed that it was only later in the history of the cult that the animal became seen as an embodiment of the creator god Ptah. The Apis bulls were chosen through a process of identification, in which certain physical marks were key: a light triangle on their forehead, a certain pattern on their back, double hairs on their tails and a scarab-like mark on the tongue. Once chosen, the Bull was installed by means of a sacred ceremony, after which it lived a luxurious life in a shelter with a window, through which it could be seen by the public and it even had a “harem” of cows. It is thought that the Apis Bull functioned as an oracle whose predictions were determined by the interpretation of its movements. Simply being in its presence could bestow on one additional virility. Hirst’s depiction of the Golden Calf as the Apis Bull goes far beyond the act of alluding to the paintings of Claude Lorrain, Nicholas Poussin and their precedent in the Vatican, by making explicit the presumption that the regression the Israelites at the foot of Mount Sinai were guilty of was not only the worship of an idol, but actually of a specific idol, which meant they still accepted the power of an Egyptian god, before their own immaterial and all-mighty Lord. (None of Hirst’s three precedents adopts those distinguishing marks that would irrefutably identify the Calf as part of a specific cult.) Implicit in this, one can assume, is the usual Judaic fear of unrestrained sexuality, an element that is clearly illustrated in Poussin’s work. According to Hirst the Golden Calf is the Apis Bull, with his calf being entirely modelled after figures of the Bull easily found in many British museums. As is usual in his practice, The Golden Calf is not really a sculpture, rather the thing itself, a careful pickled animal, augmented with real golden hooves and horns, and the ornamental headdress. It is striking that Hirst’s interest in the art of Ancient Egypt has drawn no interest, because his long-standing fascination with death and the preservation of flesh
is so much a part of the European idea of Egyptian civilisation. Wandering through his retrospective at the mausoleum-like Tate Modern, through room after room containing walls of cabinets with vials for pharmaceuticals and of works that take decaying flesh as their subject, it seemed to me that the magic he wants his art to have is one that can bestow not virility but immortality. It is as if Hirst has always been aware of Herodotus’ observation that; “The Egyptians were the first people to put forward a belief in the immortality of the soul.”6
TOTEMS To think that Hirst’s concern—if that word could be applied to an artist like him—might be with the historicity of the Egyptian image is to misunderstand the originality of the circumstance in which he is presenting his works. It would be better to see The Golden Calf as a symbolic repetition of one of his already successful and archetypal works—the famous preserved tiger shark known as The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991). Like the shark, the Golden Calf is an image of greed. It is similar to the shark in another way, too, in that it represents a surfacing from the depths. Whereas the shark surfaces violently from the depths of an oceanic
subconscious, the Golden Calf arrives in the bright light of day from the twilight world of the West’s repressed memory of Egypt. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, Hirst’s most famous work, is a powerful precedent for The Golden Calf, in that both can be seen as indicating the peculiar nature of the icon—or idol—in the contemporary art market and the broader world of the media. Although Hirst, along with the other London artists of his generation known as the YBAs, was brought to global prominence through the collecting of the advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, it was this work that came to stand for their collective audacity.7
What was this new, cool, British audacity? It was the impulse to admit the crucial role of money in every aspect of life to turn what previously would have been seen as something that might be crass, a source of embarrassment, into something entertaining. In the case of Hirst’s shark, something museumological became a thing at once immaterial—art with a capital ‘A’—and commercial. The animal demonised through the movie Jaws had become an emblem of neoliberal fun. Thanks to Hirst, the tabloids, always so important in public life in Britain, could simultaneous ridicule the absurdity of High Art and celebrate the class
e g y p t o l o g y a n e w : d a m i e n h i r s t , a n c i e n t e g y p t a n d t h e b i g m o n e y
victory of a lad from Leeds. There is another dimension to this that is more disturbing. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living was sold on auction, at its peak price, for $US12 million to the USA collector and hedgefund manager Steve Cohen. Cohen kept it in his London office as a kind of trophy, or hyper-capitalist memento mori. Writing about seeing the work in Cohen’s office in Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk, a book on the structural failings of the global financial industry, the Australian economist Satyajit Das reflected that it was typical of that era of excessive aggression and ethical indifference. What seems key to me in the parallel between the shark and the Calf is that both images disrupt those aspects of contemplation on an artwork that might be thought to be typical, resulting in a lack of reflection on the absence of symbolic meaning, social significance or moral concern. By comparison with the radical nullity of the shark, The Golden Calf is a traditional work, an embellished object with various cultural allusions, even moral—or Biblical—implications. Even if it were the case that the calf were not based on the Apis Bull, the symbol of the cow or bull is itself intrinsically connected to the brute simplicity of exchange value: the word “cattle” originated in thirteenth century Anglo-French and is related to the Old French “chatel”; the medieval Latin “capitale” originally referred to livestock of various kinds, and in the late sixteenth century it came to apply specifically to cows and bulls. Although there is the inevitable tendency to relate The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living and The Golden Calf to ‘bullish’ images, it might be that the works are more akin to that very English tradition of the equestrian painting, which was visual proof of ownership of that kind of sleek gambling machine.
AUCTION As a body of new work, an intentionally pan-mediated event and sale, Beautiful in my Head Forever might be regarded as one single, epic artwork: a defining statement of Hirst’s vision as an artist, in which the relationship between art and its ‘value’ (culturally, financially, spiritually) achieved a seamless co-dependency—thus further amplifying its stark commentary on those fundamental concerns it addresses.”8
London Underground advertisement for Charles Saatchi’s
Be the Worst That You Can Photo courtesy www.ravishlondon.com
http://www.ravishlondon.com/ items/(1481).html
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This is how writer and critic Michael Bracewell described Hirst’s straight-to-auction exhibition, an event, as I mentioned above, that took place on the eve of the Global Financial Crisis. In its double-speak, its evasion of the use of the word “greed” and its weak attempt to present the auction as a kind of self-critical Gesamkunstwerk, Bracewell has failed to appreciate that what Hirst was about to achieve was not principally about The Art Market, but about The Museum and how it establishes—institutionalises —value by producing and housing the historical. The audacity of this event went far beyond anything Hirst had attempted before, because it undermined those agents in the artworld—gallerists, curators, critics, historians—whose roles are intended to gradually create the circumstances that make possible collecting and the collection’s eventual incorporation, through the Museum, into the broader culture. By sending the work straight to auction, Hirst evaded the time and the commercial and intellectual labour it takes to enable work to accrue value. Instead of the art- object passing from the hand of the maker to a sales-person, then under the eyes of the critic and historian to a collector and then, as a part of a collection, to an institution, this body of Hirst’s works went straight from his workshop to an auction and then to an art warehouse or bank vault. In a certain sense it would seem there is no difference between the vault, in which expensive, hard-to-insure contemporary artworks are kept and a tomb in which precious sculptures have been placed around an important person’s mummified corpse. In both their works, value is invested and activated in something called The Afterlife. Sold to an unknown buyer for £10.3 million, Hirst’s The Golden Calf has not yet, as far I am aware, been exhibited. Like so many other works sold in the upper-reaches of the global art market, it is a kind of cypher of capital, an idea of the Image. Yet this calf, as much as that sculpture of the original, biblical incident, is not mere graven image. In its particularity, its iconicity, Hirst’s Calf demonstrates how meaning and historical allusion disappear in the process of capitalisation. Not even one of the many people who wrote on his work thought to consider the Egyptian aspect of the icon! Even in the midst of the auction, which attracted a huge amount of attention from the international news media, the blindness of contemporary art’s commentators increased. In fact it could be said that an art
auction itself is that theatre, that strange kind of peepshow, in which capital’s acceleration leads to the disappearance of the Image itself. It is as if Hirst’s work, especially The Golden Calf, could be said to have been made only for the eyes of the undead, the zombies of accelerated capital. Understood within the broader context of changes taking place in the global artworld and in the strange, fast-evolving intimacy of new technologies like Facebook and iPhone, the example of Hirst’s The Golden Calf, its illustration of value and of the emptying of the historical iconocity of its Egyptian tradition should meet with recognition in the context of the study of the post-colonial. Just as the imperial West neutralised signs of African civilisation by ripping the artefacts from the original circumstances of their use and meaning, so too contemporary capitalism wrenches the Image from the attentive process of looking and contemplation. One journalist, interviewing an international banker at Hirst’s Gagosian show in Moscow was told: “The oligarchs know about assets like oil-fields and factories. They only buy art for fun... to be famous and entertaining. It’s a toy to them.”9 Enough said? This, our idol, Hirst’s The Golden Calf, in its ambiguous gesturing and figured vacancy, even as it awaits its return to the spotlight of another auction from its London or Ukrainian vault, is a vivid example of this kind of devolution, this particularly contemporary art.
POSTSCRIPT This essay was presented as a paper at the visual arts panel of the Afro-Europeans: Black Cultures and Identities in Europe conference in London in 2013, and so was written with a sense of how an audience familiar with the pillaging of Africa and Egypt might understand a contemporary version of the icon of the Golden Calf. Yet it had its origin in time I spent in the city the year before when I was investigating the relationship between British public art institutions and the global art market. In attempting to understand the lack of prominence of the art of so-called peripheral countries in the mainstream of the global art market, especially in the auction houses, I had started to reflect on the nature of iconocity in contemporary art. It seems to me that today writers on contemporary art seldom address the iconological nature of images, their sets of allusions and deeper histories, even while
the art market depends heavily on powerful, atavistic images, just as advertising does. Hence, my interest in that unholy trinity: Hirst, the Golden Calf and Saatchi. But this must leave us, viewers on the periphery, if not of the networked world at least of the global art market, wondering what effect this particular kind of vacuity of the image has on us? For instance, how should we see those icons-yet-to-be that were displayed to us in the relatively recent Saatchi Gallery in Adelaide: British Art Now?10 Or how reassured can we be by the acclaim implicit in Ben Quilty’s current exhibition of paintings11 at the Saatchi Gallery in Sloane Square, the heart of London’s luxury shopping precinct?