Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst’s presentation of his signature piece, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living at the Saatchi Gallery in 1992, announced the arrival of an entirely new art which combined powerful and serious social comment with sublime visual beauty in a highly finished presentational manner. Executed in the same year, Still Pursuing Impossible Desires took the theme of the proximity of our impending mortality a step further by relating the lifecycle of the butterfly, with the cycles of human love and existence. For Hirst, butterflies immediately trigger notions of beauty and love, and the fleeting, progressive lifecycle of these beautiful insects provides a powerful allegory for human existence and desire. It is one of the first large vitrines he executed, and certainly one of the first major pieces he showed in the United States, at the group show, British Art, held between September and October 1992 at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York.

This work depicts the failure of dreams through the presentation of the aftermath of existence. A vitrine of steel and glass, simultaneously fortress and cage, is divided in two. In one section the pupae hatched and grew and eventually they flew from infancy to adulthood into the larger space which is filled with a see-saw like construction incorporating two canvases, one in pink (in love) and the other in blue (out of love). At the end of their lifecycle, the butterflies would drop into one of the two canvases or to the floor. Despite the extremely ordered structure of the Minimal steel and glass vitrine in which they lived, the process by which they find their final resting place into any particular part of the sculpture was entirely random. Hirst has commented. Trapped in an urban environment, the butterflies beautiful yet ‘pointless’ and controlled existence provokes contemplation about the quality and purpose of life in general.

Hirst’s focus here is, again, on the cycle of creation and destruction, whether physical, biological, intellectual or aesthetic. Indeed, Hirst’s body of work (certainly throughout the 1990’s) can be seen as a series of propositions that seduce the viewer into contemplating the crucial questions of existence, without becoming enchanted by a sentimentalized form of expression. Certainly, Hirst’s concepts are complex, but the vehicle he creates to carry these ideas is always fresh and vital. This contradiction between an arresting intellectual agenda that begs fundamental questions about our lives, and an object that appears so flamboyant and extraordinary that it is hard to consider it as an object for such contemplation, is central to Hirst’s vision. That polarity, between the content of an idea and the polish of its execution, is nowhere better exemplified than in the present work. At once this installation is a bold, grandiose gesture that manages to maintain a suitably quiet voice in describing the transience of life, and the passage from innocence to experience.

Still Pursuing Impossible Desires has its origins in a series of Butterfly Paintings which emerged from one of Hirst’s most important early installations: In Love & Out of Love, exhibited at the Woodstock Street Gallery, London, between June and July, 1991. Two separate floors were transformed into a tropical rainforest simulation, filled with differently colored monochrome paintings. Pupae hatched in minimalist boxes and then flew around the room, alighting on the various canvases. The cycle of life and death was thus inextricably linked to the actual processes of Hirst’s art; if not physically, certainly intellectually. Another aspect of Hirst’s decision to pepper this installation with butterflies lies in their multilaminated iconographical power and meaning. Other than their transformative or regenerative properties, the butterfly is a symbol of love, and in their blissful drifting within this vitrine, they have enacted a love story which makes the work akin to a hopelessly Romantic emblem. Indeed, Cupid and Psyche both behold a butterfly in depictions of this Greek myth, from Renaissance times onwards. Psyche is the Greek word for butterfly, and it also means ‘soul’. Perhaps there is no illustration more profound of the soul as that of the butterfly, emerging from its pupae, resplendent in its new colors and forms. Furthermore, the butterfly signifies creativity, and the release of thought, as if the present work may be seen as one Hirst’s ‘flight of fancy’.

In the final analysis, Still Pursuing Impossible Desires records Hirst’s own desire to want to live forever. It also records his realization that he cannot. In 1995, the artist would return to this idea, with the work And Still Pursuing Impossible Desires. Created using a different vocabulary, the idea remains the same. Just as the butterflies pass from one state to another, so too will the ‘beach ball’ forever remain suspended (or imprisoned) within the minimalist mausoleum Hirst has erected for it.