![]() ![]() Except that where Duchamp was pointing to an actual object in the world, Hirst uses his assistant-made “dots” to point to the immaterial idea of representation. You might think of these paintings as handmade readymades, “found” by Hirst in his studio and then held up for our study as art, in the tradition of Duchamp’s urinal-turned-sculpture. Instead, the dots in Hirst’s new paintings are a subject he wants to point to, and he has to keep them at arm’s length in order to do that pointing. And when I say that Hirst’s “dots” stand for depiction, I mean it: since his marks are all laid down by a team of assistants, they aren’t mere examples of Hirst the painter at work, like the brushstrokes in a Hals or Rembrandt. That act is the Degree Zero that depictive art is built upon. They may not actually depict anything, but as a field of messy marks on a surface each one stands for the most basic component in a traditional art of depiction-the simple act of applying a dollop of paint. The “dots,” on the other hand, are all about representation. You could say that they represented an attempt to reach Abstraction Degree Zero. The Spots were fundamentally about abstraction as reduced to its most basic components: color, form, and placement. Instead, in the terms of classic semiotics, the new “dots” in fact become what they are by virtue of not being Spots. I hope the name suggests, at least, that to confuse the two bodies of works is to commit that cardinal art historical sin, pseudomorphism-imagining that two works that look quite alike also and necessarily have similar meanings. But the new name also implies that, for all their similarity, there is some kind of notable difference between Spots and “dots,” old and new. Hirst has titled them the Colour Space paintings, but I prefer to think of them as the “dots.” The virtue of that name is that it brings them into close contact with Hirst’s more famous Spot paintings, those thousand or more paintings of perfectly regular, evenly spaced circles of color that he started making in the late 1980s. Typically he took big fields of white or black paint and packed them tightly with messy little dots of colored enamel, all jostling against each other and often even overlapping. Some four years ago, Damien Hirst began to produce a new body of paintings.
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