November 92                                                          

 

 

Except from Year of the Pig. Chapter 45. Damien Hirst studio visit  1

 

A week later, Tanya introduces me to Damien Hirst on the street outside of American Fine Arts and he says I look and sound like an actor. Damien has a crew cut, a Northern English accent and was wearing a black leather jacket and jeans and sounds more like a truck driver.

 

He says that the art world is a beautiful place but the people in it make it ugly and tells me he wants to come out and do a studio visit.

 

On the way he smokes a lot of Marlborough cigarettes and makes a lot of jokes and screams out obscenities out of the car window at old ladies on the street as if he has some kind of Tourettes syndrome.

 

We drive out to the studio and I show him the sex work and he says, "This is really fucking mental, I love it, why don't you hang the Ring a Ring of Roses on the wall"

I say "you mean a like a painting"

 

He says, "Yeah, why haven’t you shown all of them?”

 

I say, "I don't know it, I think the work freaked people out.  It's really weird, I’ve done about a 100 studio visits. Everyone has seen this work but won't touch it with a 10-foot pole” and laugh.

 

He says, "have you seen Cindy Sherman’s and Charles Ray's work at the Documenta. It really reminds me of these pieces”

 

I say "yes, I saw it over the summer” then I show him my auto fellatio piece of a male blowup doll sucking himself.

He asks, when did you make these?

 

I said “two years ago” in 1990. I think they made theirs much more recently. Hudson, Charles Ray’s dealer also recently showed some of this work and bought my Popeye piece and copulating dildos a year and a half ago. He was supposed to show my  Ring of Dolls before he showed Charles Ray's work, but he postponed it for some reason.

 

Damien looked again and said ”You could also bronze them".

 

I said, “ Yeah, good idea, but I kind of like the artist breath element involved”.  I blew these up myself.