A brush with meaning

Damien HIRST is not surprised that people have offered him their bodies to stick in glass cases after they die, like he did with those sheep and rotting cow carcasses and with that shark in formaldehyde that recently sold for $8 million.

“Yeah, sure, I’ve got a whole cabinet for nut cases. Because I attract quite a lot,” he says, “ ‘cause I make strange art.”

But there are limits, clearly -- the art world’s shock ‘em showman of death is not planning to take any of the nuts up on their offers or display his own body that way, either, after he’s gone. Gonzo writer Hunter S. Thompson may have willed that his ashes be blown from a cannon, but Hirst has no intention of making his own demise part of his act.

“I’d like to get buried in my garden,” he says. “In Devon.”

That’s three hours outside London, along the coast, where he has a 24-acre farm and a 300-year-old converted inn and room for his mum and his two kids, soon to be three. The bad boy of British art turns 40 in three months and already has a large rock picked out, a slab of quartz, that he plans to have set on top of him when he’s laid to rest on a placid spot by the house and the sea, a plot with a view, “a great view of everything.”

ART BY COMMITTEE

The day before the opening of his New York show, Hirst is still moving stuff around the Gagosian Gallery down in Chelsea, carting an 8-foot-wide painting of his DNA from the room with the giant skulls to the room full of paintings of colorful pills that give us the illusion of a cure, one titled “The Tears of Jesus.”

The show itself is titled “The Elusive Truth!” and there is much, indeed, that’s elusive, starting with how they can describe it as Hirst’s first show ever of paintings when he’s been showing paintings for years. OK, those were dot paintings and spin paintings and butterfly paintings -- using real butterflies -- and these are actual oils on canvas. But that brings up another elusive matter, however trivial and lowbrow -- of how much of the paint Hirst lays on himself. He’s been saying for years that he can’t really draw, in the Michelangelo sense, that he merely has ideas and “sort of just doodles.” Now he suggests that he’s hardly lifted a brush on any of these paintings that are being sold -- or have already -- for up to $2 million each.

“I tell everyone what to do,” is how he explains his role.

He’s brought a delegation of 10 from England, six of them artists. Their empty beer bottles from the night before still litter a portable work table in one of the gallery’s showrooms. Hirst’s brother is curled up against a wall, trying to nap through the sirens from emergency vehicles whizzing up the West Side Highway. One of the women lifts her shirt to show Hirst the scar from her appendix surgery. And another blue-jeaned assistant, Nick Lumb, puts finishing touches on “Suicide Bomb Aftermath (Baghdad),” a 7-foot-tall painting that replicates a news photo of a ghostly old man being carried from wreckage in Iraq. Hirst saw it in the newspaper, tore it out and gave it to his crew to copy on the jumbo canvas.

“That’s the wrong color, the yellow,” he says, pointing.

“He’s the brain! He’s the brain!” Lumb says of the boss.

All the paintings in the show began as photographs, some of Hirst’s installations -- of a dissection table, for instance -- but many are found images, from newspapers or magazines. The two skulls? That was the widely distributed picture contrasting a normal-sized human skull with the tiny one of a Hobbit-like species, Homo floresiensis, recently discovered on an Indonesian island. Hirst was intrigued by the photo, gave it to his assistants and now the bigger skull looms, in oil, 9 feet tall.

“He’s the bloody genius,” Lumb says. “I mean, he hasn’t got time to do them all himself.”

Do people think Rubens painted his murals by himself or that Warhol churned out those silk screens with his own hands? “ ‘Cause, you know, Frank Lloyd Wright, he actually built his own houses,” Hirst quips. “He lays the cement on the brick. He makes the bricks.”

“Yeah, exactly,” Lumb says. “He’s the brains and we’re the simple guys who sort of, like, do a few of the brush strokes to start things off.”

Hirst’s brain and deadpan delivery have been provoking people -- and gaining followers -- from his days as a working-class college lad, when he got other of the “YBAs,” Young British Artists, to join the 1988 “Freeze” show he organized in a warehouse at London’s Surrey Docks. Others before had put found objects in cases, but he soon was scribbling on a beer coaster how to display an ocean predator and envisioning a decaying cow’s head with maggots and flies and an electrified zapper, so the flies bred and perished in a continuing life (and death) cycle.

The glass vitrines became his trademark -- later ones contained office equipment and gynecological tools, underwater, with fish swimming about -- but his visual vocabulary also included medicine cabinets and the shelves of alluring pills, which was how ad man Charles Saatchi discovered him. The British collector went on to stage 1997’s aptly titled “Sensation” show, which included Tracey Emin’s tent with the names of “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With” and Chris Ofili’s elephant dung Virgin Mary -- the piece that caused a furor when the show moved to Brooklyn in 1999 -- but he predicted that Hirst’s works were the ones that people still would be looking at 100 years from now. And Hirst just kept doodling out new ideas: hovering beach balls on jets of air over a field of knives; floating 13 pingpong balls on fountains of red wine as his version of the Last Supper; and displaying giant ashtrays filled with popular implements of slow death, cigarette butts.

Of course, one of his ashtrays also recently popped up on the cover of a book by a Long Island professor, decrying “the end of art” and citing Hirst as Exhibit A in a trend toward “postaesthetic” works that merely throw the banality of everyday life back at us -- the sort of conceptual art that long has inspired less-urbane critics in the yahoo crowd to mutter, “I could have done that.”

“You didn’t,” Hirst says back.

However much his assistants may think of him as a walking brain, he opts for another symbol on the back of his fatigue jacket, a skull, and that’s a tiny skull too hanging from the chain around his neck.

Hirst has been fascinated by portrayals of death since his schoolboy days in Leeds, when he’d go to “the anatomy museum” on weekends to sketch “in the room where they’d have like 200 bodies on tables for the medical students.” There’s a photo of him, at about 16, posing with one of the heads, beaming -- the big smile on his face, not the cadaver’s.

“The idea of it is more frightening than the reality,” he says of death. “It’s hard to connect a dead body to a living person, really, if you don’t know the person. You have to work very hard to remind yourself that they’re bodies. So I kind of do it like they’re chickens. They look like a piece of chicken, you know. Preserved and cut up. No blood.”

He once considered sticking grocery store chickens in miniature versions of his glass cases, so anyone could buy one. When he put the 14-foot tiger shark in a vitrine in 1991 he called it “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.”

He’s never been one to leave works untitled or call them, like Jackson Pollock, “Number 14.” One painting in the Gagosian show is titled “The Devastating Impact of Crack Cocaine.” It’s based on an antidrug campaign in the U.K. that showed a sequence of mug shots of a woman who couldn’t shake the habit.

“She’s dead now,” Hirst says. “You party hearty, you pay for it.”

He tried crack “a couple of times, yeah” and found it “pretty good, but you definitely want more,” just as he sampled the antidepressant featured in another painting, Ativan. “A downer, but a good one,” he says of that. “Loved it when I did it.”

That was while he was doing the rockers one better during the late night antics at the Groucho Club, the London arts-celebrity hangout named for Groucho Marx’s credo disdaining any club that would have him as a member. Hirst says he has embraced sobriety for a couple of years, though that makes certain moments difficult, such as show openings.

He figures this one will be a nightmare, with thousands of people expected, many eager to pat him on the back or ask a question. “I’m coming early and then I’ll probably leave,” he says. “It just gets too much, especially ‘cause I’ve stopped drinking.”

The largest painting in the show, “Mortuary,” is based on a photo in a medical book he had as a teenager. It’s a wide-angle shot of a pristine autopsy room whose central figure is a metal autopsy table surrounded by a checklist of organs, a scale and, in the background, a mop and a pail. But as a painting, it’s 15 feet wide, and when you stand in front of it, it feels like the room is about to topple onto you. “The perspective’s all gone wrong,” Hirst says approvingly. “Cold, isn’t it? The cold steel of death or something like that.”

At another time, he might have re-created the entire room as a sculpture. He sees advantages, though, to the oil on canvas, which may start with copying a photo but with the brushwork becomes “a bit dreamy ... kind of ... painterly,” and also removes us one step further from the chilling scene. “Artists are supposed to be emotional,” Hirst says, “so to try to reduce it to a very clinical thing, I think, it starts to feel a bid odd. And I get excited by that ... Because of the painting it becomes a different kind of scary. It’s almost like inside your mind instead of in-your-face.”

And there’s another upside to an illusion created by nothing but paint, as opposed to steel and glass. “Just put a screw in the wall,” he notes, “and hang it.”

Like most all the paintings in “The Elusive Truth!” this one has been presold by art dealer Larry Gagosian. French billionaire Francois Pinault bought “Mortuary” for his new contemporary arts museum in Paris, scheduled to open in 2007, paying $1.8 million.

Hirst says his 9-year-old son, Connor, came home one afternoon and said, “Daddy, a girl at school told me that you’re rich.”

It’s hard to explain to a kid how this didn’t happen overnight -- it’s taken two decades -- or how he had to spend millions to buy his works back from Saatchi in 2003 after their falling out. Or how he has had bad ideas, like his pharmacy-themed restaurant in Notting Hill, which went bust. Then again, 500 bidders went bonkers last fall when Sotheby’s auctioned off the barstools and martini glasses that Hirst designed for the place and he wound up making a mint anyway. The lesson: Hire a chef who pays attention to the food, he says, instead of prancing around like some celebrity.

He says he had a talk about wealth and fame with his son, who’s a budding artist and “a great drawer, much better drawer than I was,” and who even picks normal subjects for a boy his age -- warriors and superheroes in elaborate armor. Hirst then went to the school so the other kids could see firsthand what Connor’s daddy is like and not have to rely on the whisperings of their parents. He took his spin machine with him and showed Connor’s schoolmates how to use it. He also brought a stamp that said “This painting was made by ------ with Damien Hirst.”

He didn’t sign them, however, for the simple reason that, if he had, some parents might have had visions of new cars, or home additions, and not stuck the kids’ little spin paintings on their refrigerators.

Is it not a crazy time for the man who runs his arts enterprises under the banner Science Ltd.? Lunch has arrived, so Hirst sits on the gallery floor to eat spaghetti, then opens an envelop from a friend, with a gift: a necklace made entirely of paper, with white paper loops as a chain and, as the pendant, a paper dollar sign. Paper bling.

AMONG THE ADORING

There’s a line outside the Gagosian Gallery half an hour before the doors open at 6 p.m. March 11 for the show that runs through April 23. Some wealthy collectors have gotten private tours over the last couple of days, but the official opening draws a throng of aficionados and familiar faces, with actors Steve Buscemi and Gina Gershon among the first to view Hirst’s 30 paintings.

The artist himself waits until 6:30 to make his entrance, carrying a Diet Coke and wearing oversized orange-tinted glasses and a suit from his favorite designer whose pants are left frayed at the bottom and whose jacket has, naturally, a skull on its back. As he expected, he is mobbed as he walks into the showroom with the “Mortuary” scene and paintings of an empty hospital corridor and a “Sliced Human Brain.” Hirst signs a half-dozen books and programs handed to him and then says, “I got a pregnant wife here. Let me go find her.” That he does, in another room, and gives her a kiss. By 6:37, Hirst has made his exit, to a private section of the gallery.

Though he uses “wife” interchangeably with “girlfriend,” he is not married to Maia Norman, who remains behind to accept congratulations from a procession of acquaintances -- both for his show and because she’s due to have their third child in September. One friend jokes how “Trouble and strife/that rhymes with wife,” but she says that’s not the reason they haven’t gone for the ritual. Partly it’s been a case of “if it’s not broken ... “ and they also share a “bad memory

She was born in Berkeley and raised in Orange County, where she grew into an unusual blend of beach kid and bohemian, learning to body surf the waves off Corona del Mar and Newport before heading off, at 21, to study fine art in Paris. When school there didn’t work out, she decided to return home but stopped first in London, where she wound up in a relationship with Jay Jopling, who became Hirst’s first art dealer. One thing lead to another and today the onetime California girl speaks in a distinct British accent.

Norman, who has designed jewelry and clothing over the years, says she also functioned much as Hirst’s assistants do today when, in his early days, he thought it might be interesting to create rows of perfectly spaced dots on white backgrounds using house paint. “In fact, I was his first spot painter. He was going to make the spots really amorphous and I said, ‘No, no. Use a compass and do these properly.’ Yeah, I did the first 10.”

She swears that it’s not just shtick, then, when he suggests he does little of the actual painting today -- other than, say, laying on the bright red paint depicting the blood streaming from under the eye of the man in “Football Violence.”

“No, it’s true. He comes in and recommends changes and decides where and when. But basically, no, he doesn’t,” says Hirst’s significant other.

But it would be a mistake, of course, to think he couldn’t. Norman has saved virtually every scrap of paper with Hirst’s “doodles” over these years, now compiled in a massive -- 8-pound -- boxed book, “From the Cradle to the Grave.” Most of its 352 pages are filled with the raw material of his brain at work, his playing with how to position the dead creatures in those vitrines, or imagining the old smokes sitting in the ashtrays. Thrown in as well, however, are his schoolboy notebooks with the exercises they make you do -- the torsos and heads, and copying of famous portraits -- and also some drawings signaling works to come, of a terrifying insect and ... a cow’s head. And for those who doubt, there are more recent drawings, frenetic sketches on hotel stationery, pages of newspapers -- whatever -- showing a London club owner sleeping on a train, a gallery owner upside-down, and ... skulls. The limited-edition book goes for $330, or $560 signed.

The death talk is not just shtick either, Norman says -- she’s heard him go on about how everybody dies of cancer these days and how that English writer had to have his tongue cut out to live, and if that happens to him “let’s leave the tongue and call it over.” But the irony, she notes, is that he is in one of the rare professions with a long history of graceful endgames, one with its suicide cases, yes, but also the Picassos and Monets, “you know, being able to sketch and draw.... to be a kind of grand old, craggy old man, and to be able to be creative and doodle away ...

“It’s a wonderful life,” she says. “Isn’t it?”

Norman sees them dividing their time, at that stage, between the farm in Devon and a place they recently bought, at her urging, on the beach in Mexico. They just spent two months there and are planning to build a studio so Hirst can work while she surfs with Connor and their other son, Cassius, who will soon turn 5.

It was an idyllic time, except that they did have to pause and think when the deadly tsunami struck in Asia, and there was one other concern about living so close to the water.

“Yeah, actually, it’s funny,” Norman says. “Both of the kids are insanely terrified of sharks.”

‘GET A NEW FISH’

During this trip to New York, Hirst got to meet the man who bought his most famous work. A couple of nights before the opening, Gagosian brought Hirst to a dinner with collectors in an apartment in Trump Tower on 5th Avenue. One was hedge fund manager Steve Cohen, the latest in a line of Wall Street victors to decide that his life’s passion is accumulating contemporary art and who paid Saatchi $8 million for the shark a couple of months ago.

With 20 people around, they didn’t have time for much more than a “Nice to meet you” and “It’s in good hands,” but Cohen is coming to the party after the gallery opening, and they’re sure to meet again there. The party for “The Elusive Truth!” is uptown on Park Avenue, at the Lever House, where they’ve just installed Hirst’s 33-foot-tall bronze takeoff on one of Degas’ exotic ballet dancers. In the towering courtyard sculpture, “Virgin Mother,” the young woman is pregnant and her insides exposed on one side, as in a medical model.

The issue with the shark is its condition. The tissue is decaying and the solution around it, only 5% formaldehyde, growing cloudy. Many might expect Hirst to want nature to take its course -- to let it go the way of the balloon that the late artist Piero Manzoni blew up and put on display in 1960 and which now hangs limp, as “Artist’s Breath,” when exhibited. But Hirst can’t see that.

It’s not like his piece is only a concept. He reasons that if one of his fish tanks dropped and broke, what would you do? Get a new tank. So he’d blow that balloon back up. And if the fish gets broken, “You get a new fish.”

“Make it look as great as it did,” he says, “on the day it was made.”

The billionaire Cohen seems out of place at the party packed with beautiful people. He’s short and balding, with round wire rims, and gentle-looking, escorting his wife through the mob.

“We’re going to preserve it, and we’re going to display it,” he vows as he reaches Hirst.

Cohen won’t say where it might be displayed, but he’s on an acquisitions committee of an institution just blocks from here, the Museum of Modern Art, a place where future centuries could well still view Damien Hirst’s shark in a tank.

The artist’s business manager, Frank Dunphy, is standing a few feet away, listening in, floating on the wine and on surviving the day. He’s been talking about the risk Hirst took in showing only paintings, and oils at that, and how the critics may grumble but how you have to look at the background details to really understand works such as his giant mortuary scene. “It’s all about the mop,” Dunphy says of that piece. “Cleaning up.”

And what’s the big deal about finding a new shark? No problem.

“Australia,” he says.

Contact Paul Lieberman at Calendar.letters@latimes.com.