Published on the occasion of Damien Hirst's exhibition at L&M Gallery, New York, October 2010, the first ever medicine cabinets book is contextualised by the artist's following of the punk movement. The first twelve sculptures in the book are named after the title tracks on the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks album. The front page newspaper spreads punctuating the book from the album's release year (1977) and the year of the cabinets' completion (1989) provide a context for reading James Frey's story poem, Fuck This and Fuck That, which describes the listless protest of a teenage waster. The song titles and cabinet names - No Feelings, Liar and Seventeen - resound with the frustrations of Thatcherite Britain and the violence borne out in daily uprest and anarchy, as depicted in the news: IRA MEN HELD IN BIG SWOOP; RIOT SHIELDS OUT AGAIN and DOCKS JOBS-FOR-LIFE TO BE AXED BY AUTUMN. Hirst's medicine cabinets have long been described as temples of medicinal hierarchies providing nothing more than a short-term cure in the face of death. Viewing the pervasive successes and exploitations of the pharmaceutical industry as a belief system in itself is evidence of our dependency and a form of escapism. Hirst has commented: 'I've always seen medicine cabinets as bodies, but also like a cityscape or civilization, with some sort of hierarchy within it. It's also like a contemporary museum of the Middle Ages. In a hundred years' time this will look like an old apothecary. A museum of something that's around today.'The publication features a radio broadcast interview between Damien Hirst and Steve Jones, the Sex Pistols' guitarist, covering music, girls, money, drugs, drinks and smokes. Thebook's index lists every medicine cabinet ever made and the exhibition itself will include original Sex Pistols memorabilia including album sleeves and t-shirts.
Born in Bristol in 1965, Damien Hirst grew up in Leeds and studied at Goldsmiths College, London. Most notable amongst the exhibitions he curated while at college was Freeze, in 1988, in which he exhibited his work and that of his contemporaries. The exhibition is widely believed to have been the starting point of the Young British Artists' careers, and a defining moment in kick-starting cutting edge British contemporary art.
Hirst's body of work confronts the scientific, philosophical, and religious aspects of human existence and includes sculpture, painting, and printmaking. He has exhibited widely and was awarded the Turner Prize in 1995 for
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. In 2004, Hirst collaborated with Sarah Lucas and Angus Fairhurst on an exhibit at Tate Britain called In-a-Gadda-da-Vida. In 2006, works from the artist's murderme collection were exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery, London: More recently, Hirst exhibited "No Love Lost: Blue Paintings" at The Wallace Collection, London, 2010; "Cornucopia" at Musee Oceanographique de Monaco, 2010, and with Michael Joo, "Have You Ever Really Looked at the Sun?" at Haunch of Venison Berlin, 2010.
Hirst's work can be found in many important collections worldwide, including Tate in London, The Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; Broad Art Foundation; Centraal Museum, Utrecht, Netherlands; Neue Galerie Graz, Austria, and State Museum of Berlin, Germany.
Arthur C Danto is a well-published and highly regarded author, art critic, and professor of philosophy. He was at
The Nation from 1984 to 2009. He is an editor of the
Journal of Philosophy and a contributing editor of the
Naked Punch Review and
Artforum. James Frey is an American writer. His memoirs,
A Million Little Pieces (2003) and
My Friend Leonard (2005), as well as the fictional
Bright Shiny Morning, are bestsellers.
Steve Jones is best known as guitarist and founding member of the seminal British punk rock band the Sex Pistols.
