Treasures of the Wreck of the Unbelievable Review and Opinions
Art is magical. It is a fairytale. Information technology can brand you rich. It can make you lot poor. It tin turn everything you thought you knew inside out and upside downward.
Information technology has made Damien Hirst rich, colossally and then, and now it has done something else. It has redeemed him. For years he has appeared a figure of strangely wasted and ruined promise, whose commercialism snuffed out his artistic spark. Yet with his exhibition Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, which fills not merely a Venetian palace just also the capacious halls of the ship-shaped Punta della Dogana at the mouth of the Thousand Canal, the arrogant, exciting, hilarious, mind-boggling imagination that made him such a thrilling artist in the 1990s is audaciously and beautifully reborn.
The immature artist who put a tiger shark in a glass tank never died, afterwards all, and we who lost faith in him look like fools for declining to believe.
Not that he is taking credit for the Egyptian statues, Greek armour, Chinese bells, unicorns, medusas and other wonders that unfold in ever more listen-boggling richness and strangeness as you explore what amounts to an unabridged museum of ancient history and myth. Hirst claims a new function, that of archaeological impresario, presenting to the world one of the most of import discoveries of recent times. In 2008 the wreck of a treasure transport called the Apistos (meaning "the Unbelievable") was institute on the seabed off east Africa. It sank about 2,000 years agone. Its unique cargo of global artefacts, assembled by a freed slave called Cif Amotan Ii, have spent 2 millennia undergoing a "sea change" direct out of Shakespeare's Tempest, becoming wrapped in coloured corals and bizarre crustacean growths - until the archaeologists who establish this sunken marvel asked Hirst to use his millions to help recover information technology.
If you believe that, y'all'll believe anything. The curators who told this bit of hokum straightfaced at the start of the press view deserve bonuses, if Hirst has not yet bankrupted himself creating this luxury masterpiece. Telltale clues that we are non actually seeing ancient works of art include a barnacle-encrusted statue of Goofy, a sculpture of Mowgli and Baloo, and what looks like a Jeff Koons statue that has been left on the seabed for a few years. The multicoloured corals are more often than not painted bronze.
I was disappointed for a moment. Photographs and films of the salve project Hirst's team carried out in the Indian Ocean make you hope for an underwater exhibition or a boat ride through a sunken earth. Instead, the display at Punta della Dogana starts with a gargantuan faux Aztec dominicus stone that frankly looks like a prop from an Indiana Jones film. Is this going to be any more artistically rewarding than a trip to the Harry Potter studios to run into the sorting hat? But Hirst'southward wizardry proves to be the real thing.
Information technology takes a kind of genius to push kitsch to the indicate where it becomes sublime. Hirst's hero Koons has done something similar information technology with his giant reflective balloon dogs. Hither, the kitsch doesn't and then much grow on y'all as wrap yous in its tentacles and drag you down into its underwater palace. After one implausible fake of an unknown pharaoh's portrait, I was disgusted. After a roomful, followed by rooms full of everything from Roman dinnerware (purportedly) to a massive coral-covered statue of a multi-armed woman fighting a writhing many-headed Hydra, I was intoxicated.
The showroom that completely overcame the last shreds of scepticism was a brandish of two enormous skulls of Polyphemus, the one-eyed cyclops that tries to eat the heroes of Homer's Odyssey. These are marble models of mammoth skulls: archaeologists believe, says a display label, that the pigsty for the mammoth's tusks may have inspired the myth of a race of one-eyed giants.
The thing is, this theory really does be, and y'all tin read a like label beside a fossil skull of a prehistoric elephant in the Natural History Museum. Throughout this exhibition, real historical information is offered about what are clearly fakes. And so again, some of the fakes are more plausible than others. Are those real Roman coins? Is that a real Roman spoon? I tin't tell.
It is the combination of intricate item and stonking, heed-blowing calibration and quantity that makes this collection so beguiling. Past the fourth dimension you get to a room full of gold objects, including a regal-looking cornucopia (horn of plenty) and a gold replica of one of the sculpted portraits of life in west Africa, you feel drugged with history and art.
It is not just a random mass of stuff, but a subtle meditation on the practice of collecting, on museums and why we become to them. Throughout the exhibition, sculptures in rollicking bad taste alternate with glass cases that evolve Hirst'southward oldest, most quintessential idea - putting things in vitrines and cabinets – into a profound prototype of the act of collecting. These cabinets comprise things of apparent antiquity and historical meaning, arranged – as they might be in a very beautiful museum – by a fastidious curator. What are the principles of arrangement? How have the treasures of the Unbelievable been classified? How do we classify and know anything at all, and what drives people to do it?
This fictional museum is not just impressive, but moving. Hirst shares his passion with us. He manifestly loves art, loves the dark and inexplicable mystery of information technology. He communicates, too, a love of history – or perhaps, rather, a love of time. Art is changed by time equally wrecks are changed by the ocean. Today's spoon is tomorrow'south wondrous relic.
Will Hirst i day be in the history books as a genius? It looks a hell of a lot more likely after this titanic return to form.
At Palazzo Grassi, you enter the second role of the exhibition to meet a foot … a leg … It is the biggest statue I take always beheld. Hirst has created a figure on the calibration of ancient monuments like the Colossus of Constantine, whose marble foot survives in Rome's Capitoline Museum. Fifty-fifty more disorientating, this figure that dwarfs and awes a now seriously addled crowd of journalists has been fitted into a tall, narrow galleried courtyard. It is a monstrous bronze man out of a dream or gothic novel. Some say it represents Pazuzu, and that the bowl it holds is for man blood – only the curator disagrees.
When did I final see a gimmicky artwork that surprised, unsettled and delighted me as much every bit this? Information technology was probably when I walked into the Saatchi gallery in 1992 and saw a tiger shark plain swimming towards me, mouth open.
Hirst has once again found the underwater grotto in his listen where the monsters live.
Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable: Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana, Venice, from 9th April until third December
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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/apr/06/damien-hirst-treasures-from-the-wreck-of-the-unbelievable-review-titanic-return
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