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Damien Hirst: a beacon of modern art in the 21st century, or a con artist? In the Tate Modern’s first retrospective of his work, on until September 9th, the recurrent themes that occupy Hirst’s head: dead animals, dots, cigarettes, pills, house flies and butterflies and diamonds…

Hirst’s £50 million diamond encrusted skull, For the Love of God (2007) is guarded in a black box room in the Turbine hall outside the exhibition and is part of the 20 year retrospective that the public can see free of charge. The skull is a shining example of Hirst’s preoccupation with death: playful defiance and self-indulgence against the void that is human mortality runs like a black thread through all Hirst’s creations.

Damien Hirst is a household name, yet it often seems he approaches his pieces like a playschool kid with a hacksaw. His artwork is a spectacle to behold, true; but is it art? Some people love it, while other art lovers hate it and view him with the same disdain as they would the spawn of the devil.

As you enter the first room of the Tate exhibition the most eye-catching object on display is a black and white photo titled, With Dead Head (1991), of Hirst aged 16, laughing as he poses in an anatomy school’s mortuary with a dead man’s severed head; the corpse’s facial expression frozen in a grotesque grimace.

This leads me to Hirst’s infamous piece in the next room: the rotting cows head titled ‘A Thousand Years’ 1990. Placed in a big glass box, the cow’s head lies in a pool of congealed blood, its tongue hanging out of one side of its mouth as if drunk – as undignified for the poor cow as it is gruesome.

Maggots hatching in a white box, hatch into flies and the flies feast on the cow’s blood. Eventually they fly into an ‘Insect-o-cutor’ which fries them dead and they mount up in a tray below. ( Incidentally , these have been collected in their thousands for another piece called Black Sun (2004) a huge round canvas covered in flies).

Maybe this cow’s head installation is exploring how life feeds off the dead and death takes back the life they borrowed. Or maybe Hirst’s artistic statement is simply about the shock factor; the mob likes an eyeful of blood and gore… Kerching!

The piece is a stomach-churning sight, but for the voyeurism of the human psyche there’s a morbid fascination, like facing our own fear of violence to our bodies. In the Dark Ages before we were ‘civilised’, the spectacle of death was like taking the family to picnic at the Proms.

The public enjoyed a good old guillotining and shoving heads on sticks; it was ‘entertainment.’ A bit of butcher’s leftovers is tame in comparison. But no one stuck a dead creature in a glass box and called it art. It makes one wonder; if Damien could have (without moral and societal constraints) used a human head in the glass box instead of a cow’s, would he?

Same question pops up for Hirst’s legendary animals in formaldehyde, namely ‘Mother and Child Divided’ (1993), the adult cow sliced in half and preserved in the tank for all to view its insides. The same fate for her calf which is placed in a case near its mother. Their insides are like mazes in empty shells; yet their fur and faces look perfect and suspended in time. There is also the enormous shark, the lambs and the dove trapped in flight within formaldehyde: each frozen in death against the power of time and nature.

Surrounding them on the gallery walls are Hirst’s less impressive spot paintings, Iodomethane 13c (1999-2001), which look like a trendy wrapping paper design. The Spin Paintings (2003), which are made from splashes of colour created by a spinning circular canvases are bright, ‘energetic’ and fun but childishly straightforward.

An exhibition room has been dedicated to Pharmacy (1992), which is just like a real pharmacy: boring. In another room there is a huge ashtray ‘Crematorium’ (1996), the size of a paddling pool, filled with old cigarette butts, it stinks and will terrify smokers. In and Out of Love (Butterfly Paintings and Ashtrays) (1991) is a collection of butterflies sporadically stuck on canvasses painted in block colours; while ashtrays are placed on the corners of tables.

Hirst has also dedicated a space to the birth of butterflies. The pretty winged-insects are doomed to hatch from chrysalises in order to sadly flap around some pot plants in a windowless room until they keel over and die.

But they don’t go to waste. Towards the end of the exhibition are Hirst’s massive psychedelic butterfly mosiacs made from thousands of butterfly wings, household gloss paint and diamond dust. They are the most vast, stunning and condense of all his works.

Hirst has made painstakingly methodical and hypnotising circular patterns from the wings, some even created to look like imposing glass-stained church windows. But ‘I Am Become Death, Shatterer of Worlds’ 2006 and the other pictures have a sadistic feel to them. Hirst has bred thousands of butterflies to steal their wings. Nature created these beautiful patterns and colours, not Hirst.

Overall this retrospective exhibition of Hirst’s artistic career has an original ‘shock factor’, for sure, but ultimately it’s up to you whether you think Damien Hirst is a media-hyped, death-fixated, shockingly perverse, pioneering artist or a cheeky con man.

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/damien-hirst

Words: Jameela Oberman

Images: Tate Modern, Damien Hirst and Science Ltd,Prudence Cuming Associates, Dave Morgan via the White Cube Gallery and the Cleveland Museum of Art

Originally written for Spindle magazine

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How do you rescue the loved remains of your awoken soul from the relentless summer heat of urban sprawl and coerce it into a beguiling darkness? Eric Wahlforss, the co-founder of SoundCloud and CTO super-brain, has another side to his personality known as the artist Forss, and he has created a very personal music project; an album that creeps into the soul by creating an abstract church in the recesses of the mind and manifesting evocative electronic music.

The album, Ecclesia, which means church in Latin, is a pioneering aural space that merges choir and organ harmonies with sampling and electronica to a devastatingly sublime effect. Like Bjork and Simian’s exploration of the iPad app, Forss has included interactive album artwork, replacing the now old-fashioned physical packaging of album sleeves, culminating in an audio-visual app to exemplify the music.

Artists Marcel Schobel and Leonard Lass joined forces to make a conceptual app for Ecclesia – taking the listener through a surreal journey for each of Eric’s songs. The album is not religious in a literal sense, yet it is a computerised exploration of the spiritual, reinvented for modern times.

Swedish born Wahlforss is a towering figure, with chiseled good looks, letter-box lips and a stocial face that rarely cracks to betray his feelings. He pauses to ruminate on how to describe his new album.

“It is a conceptual album about a ‘world of sounds.’ As a producer, it was very challenging to melt the magic of church music with electronica. We live in a secular society, religious music is overlooked, but it’s some of the most powerfully emotive music we have. I wanted to connect that old power and awe to a modern audience.”

Hence the resulting style of Ecclesia is very different from Eric’s debut album Soulhack (2003). But, like his contemporaries Akufen and Jichael Mackson, the use of sampling is still a vital component. His production mixes choir, organ and strings and drops in ambient sound fragments such as angelic voices, distant coughing in the back of church pews, the sound of metal falling on a hardwood floor and even congregants whispering.

The archaic intensity of the music is complemented by the obscure visuals on the Ecclesia app for the iPad. Why these haunting images framing the sounds? “They’re ancient Christian mythical symbols, for a sense of history to match the music.” Wahlforss adds: “ Like the ladder and bed image, for the tune Somnio Somnium, it’s Jacob’s Ladder from the bible.”

The Forss Ecclesia app can make you a kind of god over your own mini Ecclesia universe, manipulating the visuals like in a lucid dream. You can feel the music flowing around the visuals, you can zoom in and out and swipe between the sculptures, creating a seductive ambience to sink into. It is a creation portentous of more artists experimenting with apps, and a future of music albums becoming experiences very much like 3D gaming.

Wahlforss reveals that his unorthodox digital experiments melting electronica, digital technology and renaissance and biblical mythology, was a fixation many years before he dreamt up the music-sharing platform SoundCloud. As a small boy he used to sit quietly in the pews of a church, watching his mother conduct a choir.

Was Eric scared of the church then? “It kinda bored me when I was a kid. But, yes, at the same time the music scared me a bit and still does. It took me until adulthood to find a connection and now it’s a really strong part of my life. I like its melancholic nostalgia.”

Eric’s grandfather, Ingmar Stoltz, was a famous priest in Sweden who helped reform the church to make it more accessible, and the discussions on philosophy they shared also made a deep impression on him. Spiritual music runs deep in Eric’s veins. Many artists have launched their music careers by singing in church choirs but Wahlforss is different because he was an observer, absorbing the music’s influence to one day engineer a melting pot of antiquated religiousity and club electronica, fusing the historically archaic to sci-fi-like digital tools.

He’s been hugely influenced by sci-fi, being a voracious reader of Peter Nilson,“I was totally obsessed, I read all his books as a teenager. He was a Swedish astronomer cataloging the galaxies, yet his sci-fi stories managed to connect science with culture and art.”

It’s as if Eric has used futuristic technology to compose requiems in tribute to the organic spiritual culture of bygone days. Many of his cited influences from classical music are requiems: known as compositions for a church mass, which are a repose for the souls of the dead.

Why the fascination with requiems? It’s just because their sheer beauty moves him; “I’m inspired by extremely emotional music, like Maurice Durufle’s Requiem – I cried listening to it. It’s about just closing your eyes and really listening. You know, requiem actually means ‘eternal light’ and that’s what I’m exploring. When listening to the music if you can think of a near-death experience, where you see yourself leave your body and fly out into the universe, it’s like that.”

http://forssmusic.com/

Article originally published in Disorder Magazine

In the grounds of the stately Somerset House that overlooks the London Thames, the huge grey rainclouds decided to give us a break from the incessant downpours so the crowd could enjoy M83’s show on Monday 16th July.

The venue’s statues of grand figures, reminiscent of Neptune, Venus and cherubs adorn the imposing building, which wraps around its courtyard and the stage. It was a perfect backdrop for the band who have long reached cult-status. First up, supporting act, Susanne Sundfør, with her trademark thumping beats and moody songs set the tone for an unusual concert night.

Then M83 made a theatrical entrance; an odd figure clad in a costume of the group’s animal mascot, slowly edged towards the stage as if stepping out of a UFO from Messier 83 (the spiral galaxy the band is named after). Slowly lifting its arms up, the mascot shot laser beams from its fingers across the crowd, accompanied by an extravagant background light show in a myriad of colours.

This built up the anticipation of an epic set. Half-expecting the band to arrive in space pods or do some kind of paranormal tricks, once on stage they actually set the tone for a more down to earth performance, with a stage light show changing in psychedelic style for each tune.

The first few songs were fairly downtempo and it seemed that in the face of the band’s love and deep absorption for what they do; the highly computerised ambient indie-electronica couldn’t match the impact of its produced sound in a live set up; the only track the crowd really chanted along to was Reunion.

Anthony Gonzalez took up the guitar for much of the set was and refreshingly affable and non hipsterish for a lead. His band, headbanging their 80s hair, bashed out the drum machines and keyboards as if they had hyperactive disco disorder. The drummer deserved an Olympic medal for his speedy endurance, and boy, do they all like to bash out those tambourines and cymbals.

While most of the songs seemed to blend into each other Midnight City and Coleurs were the stand out, high-octane tracks for the night. The distinctive Midnight City dripped with euphoria, the saxophone player making an entry towards the end of the track, took it to phenomenal heights.

Coleurs was an extended version and started with teasing out the riff, which they artfully built up in a mesh of noise to a joyous climax. Though some parts of this concert seemed static, there was a majestic quality to the show’s venue and a sense of beauty in the live set that was, in the end, a special night for fans.


Article originally published in Bearded magazine.

Words: Jameela Oberman Photos: Neville Freitas