Dances with sharks (original) (raw)

The writer Gordon Burn first met Damien Hirst in January 1992 when a magazine sent him to write about 'Young British Artists 1' at the Saatchi Gallery. Since then Burn has interviewed the artist 12 times; the edited tapes will be published in a book - On The Way To Work - later this month.

The Shark

April 1996

In the spring of 1996, Damien was preparing for his first major New York show at the Gagosian Gallery. He describes how to get a shark.

The shark - I got an idea that you can get anything over the phone. I wanted to do a shark and I thought, No, that's fucking impossible; you can't do that. I didn't go, Let's go out and get a big fucking fishing rod and go and catch a shark. I thought, Shit, you can get it over the phone. With the phone, you become totally international. You can go beyond continents. You can go anywhere in the world with a phone. That's the difference.

I went down to Billingsgate and I said to the guy, 'Oh, can you get me a shark?' And he said, 'Oh yeh, any size you want.' 'You can get me a 12-foot shark?' 'Oh yeh.' He told me how much it was per pound an' I thought I'd worked it out. So when he told me he couldn't get it, it really fucked us up.

So I got the map out and looked all around the Great Australian Bight and I took the names down of all the towns on the coast, got the numbers of the main post offices, and called them up. They stuck the posters up with my number on it and the phone never stopped ringing. Mad fucking crazy shark fishermen calling up. I did it like a system: 'Good... Maybe... Slightly possible... Idiot... Madman...' We'd mark them all. We were narrowing it down and narrowing it down. And then Scott from Momart called me up and said he'd heard of this great guy in Australia who's got a museum, called Vic Hislop. He was the best, so we just chose him. Six thousand quid. Four to catch it, and two to ship it.

The Pharmacy

28 August 1999

At the beginning of 1998, Hirst had opened Pharmacy, a bar and restaurant, with Matthew Freud and others.

GB What is the takeover of Pharmacy going to mean to you? [It had just been announced that Pharmacy, the Notting Hill restaurant that Hirst co-owned, had been bought by the Hartford Group.]

DH Mean to me financially? It means the worst thing in the world for me emotionally and personally and I wish I'd never got involved and I've devoted too much fucking time to it. Everybody looks at me and thinks I only care about money. It's, like, you dive into money, and you question money and you find out you can't rely on money. When you get involved with people in money situations and you start competing with them and you win, it looks like you're winning because you're only interested in money. But you're only winning because you don't give a fuck about money. Jonathan Kennedy's the only reason I got involved in it. He came at me in a very emotional way. He goes, 'I want to make great restaurants for people to be in.' And I believed him. I never really got to know Matthew [Freud]. And I've always been totally paranoid all along that Matthew and Jonathan are pulling a fast one on me. I refused to sell my shares. Matthew's kept his, I've refused to sell mine, and Jonathan's out of the picture.

GB Do you still have an involvement with the restaurant?

DH I have a thing in my contract which is really fantastic, which I love. Which is that they can't ever do a Pharmacy anywhere in the world without me. And it's just a real fucking shame, because I put more than a year's work into it. I've had to sign a thing which says I won't sell my shares for another year and six months. Apparently they're worth £3 million now. But in a way I wish I could've driven it into the ground. It was an incredible amount of work, for an incredible place, and then there's these...

GB Do you still own the installation?

DH Yeah, I still own the art. It's hard to define. I still worry about it. I want to do another restaurant. I really want to do a restaurant. I want to do one down here [in Devon]. But I want to do a restaurant because they're just fucking beautiful things. Every time in my life since I was a child, I've always celebrated through food, through good dinners, through meals, nice rooms.

GB Patrick Caulfield always says how much he likes restaurants. He can't be bothered with the food, but he enjoys them for the rooms, and the human traffic, and the social transaction.

DH I love 'em. I'm really proud of Pharmacy, and I'm ashamed of it at the same time. I'm totally fucking ashamed of it. I met Matthew Freud the other day, and he said, "Damien, I'm not into money." So I'm like: "What the fuck are you into?" But Pharmacy's dead. It just fucking died. It had such great possibilities.

Matthew Freud

18 April 2000

GB What did Matthew Freud see in you that was marketable?

DH No, no, no. What did Matthew Freud see in me that he wanted to destroy? Freedom. Choice. Understanding. Art. A reason to live. A belief in something above and beyond cash.

The cunts rule the world. If you want to say that art is a pile of shit, like a lot of people in the world do today, what you do is, you publicly get hold of Damien Hirst, you ram him on the ground, you stand on top of him with a fucking Union Jack in your hand, you ram it in his head, and you have a photograph taken. You've conquered Everest. [Laughter.]

No, but really. Really, really, really. People are afraid of art. Everybody's afraid of art. Everybody's always been afraid of art. And I'm one of the artists who physically represent that fear. It's, like, you really hate art, but you invite Richard Wentworth to your dinner, and he'll sit down next to you, and you're not afraid of it any more, because art falls down to the same rules as everything else. But I don't. I absolutely fucking don't. Because I don't give a shit. I'm not saying I'm any good. But I'm prepared to die. In a deal across a board table, I go, Look, you either do what I tell you or you suck my cock. It's close to kamikaze. I don't give a shit. But I do give a shit. Artists give a shit about different things to these money-grabbing cunts.

GB But that attitude is exactly what Matthew Freud was trying to merchandise. It was what he was selling at Pharmacy.

DH Yeah, but what he's basically always doing is: 'Enough's enough. How about I give you a bit of this and you give me a bit of that, and we'll cut the slack...' And I'm going: 'Kiss my arse!'

But the thing is he's a PR guru. And so am I. So what d'you do? He's looking at me like: 'We're going to find this fucker's Achilles's heel eventually.' But they don't. If you're a good artist, you don't have an Achilles's heel. Because you're just a piece of shit in the middle of the road that eventually's going to get hit by a truck. And if the truck's going to be Matthew Freud, then you're going to derail the truck as well.

He believes I do give a shit. It's, like, you can buy anything. Everything's got a price. And I'm on Matthew's agenda. So he's going to be working extra hard to take all my power away. To somehow do some kind of business deal which leaves me with nothing. And then he's going to go phttttttth! like in the school playground.

GB Were you glamoured by Matthew Freud's connection to Lucian and Sigmund Freud? You knew he was a businessman but you thought he must be a businessman with a twist.

DH In my generation - in my lifetime - art meets business. Artists become businessmen. Nothing you can do about it. I keep rattling him. I'm having a laugh. I really rate Sigmund, and I really rate Lucian. Lucian's brilliant. He's such a great guy. He's a great artist - a great painter. If you look at them close up, they look like abstract paintings, and from far away they look like flesh. Everyone else has got rubbings out. You've got nibbles; you've got fear. Lucian, when you get up close, it turns into a de Kooning.

GB That's exactly what Bacon said about Rembrandt - the accident of the brushstroke is abstract expressionism several centuries early.

DH At the end of the day, every article you read about Pharmacy is about me. And I'm the one who gets the shit for it; no one else does. At dinner parties, Matthew goes up to people and goes, 'Yes, I did Pharmacy. I'm the man behind Damien Hirst.' Which is fair enough. But you can't go round saying, 'I'm the man behind Damien Hirst', without having Damien Hirst behind you.

Charles Saatchi and Larry Gagosian

22 March 2000

Hirst had acquired 20,000 square feet of new studio space Stroud, a Cotswold village. The works for 'Theories, Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions. Results and Findings', the autumn show at New York's Gagosian Gallery were up and ready to be viewed. Saatchi and Gagosian had been down to see them a few days earlier. This interview was conducted on the Stroud-Paddington train.

DH If Charles Saatchi and Larry Gagosian had come down last week and taken a look and gone: 'Hmm, not bad...' I wouldn't have given a fuck, because I was satisfied with it. I was happy. Basically, I put them off coming down till I was satisfied. And if I'm satisfied, then I really don't give a fuck. There's no way you can. You don't make a piece for that. I mean, it's been incredibly hard work not doing anything for four fucking years, in terms of the art world. And I haven't done anything for four years because I've not felt it was any good. Or not resolved enough. You know, not happy with it. And I look at Oasis bringing out this new album now, and I just think, 'If you're not happy with it, why bring it out?' 'Cause that's what fucks everything up... I've done it in a different way. I've got the money off them first. I suppose that's what's caused me a lot of pressure as well is that I've had money off them. They've given me money. And I don't like taking money off people, and I don't like feeling I'm in debt to people. I'll never get in a situation like that again...

Like the big guy [Hymn]. I financed that myself. But all the money I had off them was used to set myself up so that I never get under pressure again. So that I've not got someone knocking on the door when I'm experimenting on something that's cost a lot of money, d'you know what I mean? To take a little toy like that of Connor's and enlarge it to that sort of size, there's a big possibility that it's going to look shit.

GB Is it a toy? I assumed it was from a teaching-hospital.

DH I wouldn't have done it with a teaching-hospital one. I did it with a toy. It's called 'The Young Scientist'. I might even get sued for it. I expect it. Because I copied it so directly [Hirst later paid an undisclosed sum to charities nominated by the toy's maker Humbrol to head off legal action for breach of copyright]. It's fantastic. I just thought it was so brilliant, and it was so accurate, it was like a chemistry set, and I loved it that it was a toy. It was really similar to a medical thing, but much happier, friendlier, and more colourful and bright. And I just thought, 'Wow! I wanna do that.' I suppose it came from that idea of Koons doing those things [the witches' hat etc]. I just thought, 'Twenty feet tall. Fantastic.' But there's no way you can get an idea of whether that's going to work or not. So to go to Saatchi and say, 'give us some money,' and it turns out it's shit and then he has to have it... So I managed to make that, blow it up, have it in my studio and sit with it until I was convinced it was good, and then decide whether I want to sell it or not. And Jay [Jopling] freaked out over it. He was: 'Let's get someone else to pay for it. Get someone else to pay for it!' And it's just shite doing that. It just doesn't work out. You don't get anyone else to pay for it. You pay for it yourself.

GB Why did you do it in bronze?

DH I just wanted it to be grand. It can go outside. It's vandal-proof. Underneath it is this big fucking grand iconic fucking artwork. I mean, I love painted bronze. The paint on it's like skin... It's an outdoor sculpture. It's like a car. It'll decay. So eventually what you'll be left with is this solid bronze man with bits of paint hanging off it. So in a way it's like what happens to your body. I liked it for that reason. That's why I went in for bronze.

GB It reminds me of something you said when you did the Building Sites film on the Worsley Building in Leeds for the BBC: 'It's almost as if the outside of the building, the exterior, is denying that it's a part of the same processes of decay and destruction and corruption as the human bodies inside the building. The dead bodies come and go and the living bodies come and go, and the building stays the same. I get the feeling from the building that it's more alive than me, which is terrifying.'

DH The guy at the foundry [where Hymn was cast], says, 'What d'you want?' So I gave him the toy and said, 'I want it made this big, 20 feet, with a base this height.' And he said, 'What do you want it to look like at the end?' And I said, 'Plastic!' He nearly had a heart attack. He said, 'But it's a bronze.' I said, 'I want it to look like plastic.' 'Well, why do you want it to be bronze?' 'Because I want it to be grand, and I want it to be bronze.' And just when he finished making it, he phoned me up and he's like, 'C'mon, we can do some great patinas... We can do a really great red patina.' I said, 'What, bright red? Like plastic?' He said, 'Well, no. Not like plastic.' 'Well, can you make it took like plastic?' And in the end, he thought it was great and he really liked it.

GB Most people will come away from it thinking it is plastic.

DH They will when it's new. But they won't in 10 years' time. It's like a car. It can be fixed up like a car or it can't be. It's tough. It's car paint. But in 20 years' time it's going to look like a 20-year-old car... I felt very sad when it wasn't there today when I went down. I missed it... When money comes in, I do things like that on the side. I'm beginning to more and more. Gagosian gave me a million dollars towards the show, which is due back on sales, or half on sales and half somewhere else.

GB How does that work with Charles [Saatchi], because he and Gagosian are business partners?

DH I don't know if they are. I mean, I'm not supposed to know that they are. I don't give a fuck. I've got one relationship with a gallery. I get a million dollars towards fabrication costs on a show, which is recuperable by the gallery.It's not a great deal. It just brings you up into a position where you've got cash to experiment. I mean, I was starting to panic, because the show was getting delayed. I was like a year-and-a-half late. Somebody said to me, 'Do you like all the work that goes into making your art?' And I said, 'No, I fucking hate it.' I really like it when they come in at the end and it looks like it just appeared and you've done fuck-all work. But lots of people, I suppose, do like all that work. But I don't like it, really. I don't enjoy that bit.

Extracted from On The Way To Work by Damien Hirst and Gordon Burn, published by Faber & Faber on 22 October 2001 at £25