GAGOSIAN GALLERY.

GAGOSIAN GALLERY, recently made known YORK

Having take downed the arena of mass-media attention occupied from such titans of overexposure as Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst can cheerfully gibe at the modest claims of art criticism. For all the brickbats throw violentlyed at him, there is the critic's temptation to just say uncle to agree to be amused if not absolutely charmed, to assert that, regardless of the apparent vulgarity of certain individual works, Hirst possesse that supremely uncritical attribute, "talent." The apparent "unoriginality" of his work--its reliance onward Surrealist shock techniques and Minimalist presentational modes--doesn't detract from his brilliance as a clap personage, a vendor of attitudes. Indeed, perhaps the best thing Hirst's work affords is an opportunity to consider the fortunes of the Pop-art attitude today. individual can't deny Hirst his succes and not and nothing else as a star of the art world (and the world at large). further there remains a certain tedium in works that thus relentlessly trade on bluntness, in succession the stratagems of morgue-and- autopsy horror. If disagreeing with Hirst forward aesthetics proves fruitless, so too does a complacent embrace of his taste and mindset.

Hirst's exhibition at Gagosian, laboriously titled "Theories, patterns Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results, and Findings," is greatly better than his 1996 exhibit at the same venue, at least in a conventionally arty way. Unlike the carnivalesque, everything-about-Damien mes of '96 this exhibition is distinguished through a certain visual clarity; Hirst has styl the exhibit very precisely. Pop and Minimalist signifiers snare in an agreeably aesthetic way. through every part of the sprawling galleries, one leitmotif signals another, ceiling-high graphs assenting repetition rectilinear vitrines, bobbing Ping-Pong balls put in mind of spot paintings and even pills. Overall, it's a well-pulled-together outfit--and the same that completely eschews the greatest in quantity signature Hirst element, animal carcasses in formaldehyde (he restricts himself here to skeletons).

We all know about Hirst's death fixation. As this is a commonplace preoccupation, it gives the artist currency in a way that the overlay of colors, say, or the institutional trappings of the art world do not. Nevertheless, it is too obvious. Visiting the gallery several times, united grows a little tired of thinking, Death, yeah, right. mostly of the works, which are extremely tidy, are more conventionally elegant without grandeur than they are gruesome. As framing devices, the omnipresent vitrines furnish almost everything agreeably pictorial. They provide "distance." (The really gros stuff--eg nasty forensic photographs--is confined to the exhibition catalogue.) In Adam and border (Banished From the Garden), 1999 the artist strains for horror, with sum of two units shrouded figures lying on gurney amid the tools of the pathologist and, common assumes, the remains of his luncheon a half-eaten sandwich. Queasiness brushes against humor. Figures in a Landscape, 2000 means dismembered figures: Behind a cluster of neatly tied garbage bags the artis t has installed an armoire and scrawled in succession the mirror, in bloody-lipsticky r "Stop me B4 I kill again." Here the true copy is altogether de trop, and the bags, in combination with the work's title, are quite implicitly grisly enough. if it were not that Hirst, true to his neo-Pop bluntnes in no degree shirks the obvious, as in forfeited Love, 2000, and Love missing 1999, both of which can be summarized as gynecologist offices-cum-fish tanks. A quotation from the artist in the exhibition catalogue drolly encapsulates the meaning: "Women have an odor of fucking kippers." Charming. An Unreasonable Fear of Death and Dying, 2000 consists of sum of two units vitrines, one enclosing a rather miserable-looking sitting extent the other an adjoining toilet. Crummy pott plants nail the coffin enclose on claustrophobic domesticity, loneliness, and boredom. Almost as an afterthought, a chain saw rips by means of an easy chair. Works like as these evince something of the "Britishness" of of the present day British Art perhaps, a reason of social foreclosure, of a predetermined darkness and doom that sucks the Life our of life no les certainly than the depredations of age and disease. A soul-crushing ticky-tackiness. Still, it all follows off as rather sophomoric, the sensibility attuned with that of a Goth teenager.

pair impulses dominate Hirst's exhibition: the desire to narrate and the desire to display. The aforementioned works belong to the narrative course Display seems to control more rigorously the "formal" works--Hirst in a cunning vein--such as The Void, 2000 certainly single of the best set pieces here, a shallow case filled with exact standards of 8,000 pills. Other displays encircle small skeletons (dogs, cats, birds, snakes, etc) gridlike arrays of surgical instruments, and anatomical moulds These could be described as Hirst's Neo-Geo-a-la-Haim-Steinbach pieces, his I-Shop-Therefore-I-Am-an-Artist works. They have calm greater clarity than the ragged, somewhat Baconesque mise-enscenes of death and despair. further once one has experienced the filled discomfort that comes with seeing for a like reason many unpleasant tools--or the slack-jawed "wonder" promised by means of the title Something Solid Beneath the Surface of Several Things Wise and Wonderful--these pieces can look rather wan. Overall, the exhibition is a miracle of overproducti forward If it wins, it wins by means of intimidation.