Damien Hirst:
Goldsmiths graduate

Young Brit Art’s bad boy and protégé of Goldsmiths College, Damien Hirst’s work generates as much controversy as his quirky personality. Claudia Livi finds out what makes the Turner Prize winning artist tick.

When I first picked up the prospectus for Goldsmiths College, what struck me was the proclamation: ‘If you come to Goldsmiths, you are bound to come out as Someone’. Damien Hirst is living testament of this prophecy.
While a Fine Arts undergraduate at Goldsmiths in the eighties, Hirst founded the “yBas” (young British artists) movement, a breath of fresh air which shook up the art establishment. Under the Thatcherite era, the educational establishment was going through major changes, as students rebelled against conventional boundaries. It was in this insurgent context that teachers and students came together to consider contemporary life and culture, with Goldsmiths at the forefront.

The movement crystallised in the ‘yBas’ Freeze, an exhibition that Damien Hirst curated while still a student. It took place in a warehouse at Surrey Docks in East London, displaying his works alongside those of his fellow Fine Art students from Goldsmiths. This exhibition, which was organised a year before his graduation proved to be a crucial point in his career. Influential art broker Charles Saatchi was there, and later bought many of Hirst’s artworks (and those of other young unknown artists) for his galleries.
Even then, Hirst had a reputation for being ‘on the edge’. He remembers, “When Freeze was going off, I used to go in looking like a tramp. Then I’d go in a suit, then I’d go in like a tramp again…So people would just be going, ‘F*****g Damien’s losing it…Oh wow, he’s really on top of it…Oh my God, he’s losing it…No, he’s on top of it’.” Reflecting on his flamboyant eccentricities he says, “It’s theatre. It’s about raising expectations and lowering expectations. I’ve always done that.”

Hirst enjoyed his most successful years immediately after Goldsmiths. Since his first exhibition in 1988, Hirst had been working constantly at shocking the public out of indifference. Mutilated carcasses and all manner of bloody anatomy feature prominently in his work. He was twice nominated for the Turner Price, and won once. In 1996 he branched out, opening a restaurant, directing short films, writing an autobiography and forming a band.

Throughout, Hirst reveled in leading an alcohol, drugs and rock’n’roll fuelled life. Although he was able to charm his way through most situations, he was banned from the Groucho Club after complaints from members. In one notorious incident in a Dublin hotel bar, he dropped his trousers and inserted a chicken bone at the end of his penis. More recently, Norman Rosenthal, the exhibition secretary of the Royal Academy, arrived at the Colony Room in Soho and found Hirst pants down at the piano. “I think I spread myself so thin,” a calmer Hirst has since recalled, “I was just drinking too much to be concentrating hard. Something had to give. I never used to get blackouts, but I get them now. I got involved in drink and drugs…Overnight I turned into a babbling wreck. I started to blow gaskets and pop rivets." Hirst seems to have emerged from those four troubled years a wiser man, focusing on his what he does best – his art. Pharmacy, the Notting Hill restaurant that he previously co-owned, has now been bought by the Hartford Group. He seems to have abandoned his pop career as well, since Fat Les, the group he formed with Alex James and Keith Allen, has only released two tracks: the hit single ‘Vindaloo’ for the 1998 World Cup and ‘Jerusalem’, the official song for Euro 2000.

Today Hirst is a proud family man living in his vast 20000 sq ft studio retreat in Cotswold village with Californian partner, Maia, and their son, Connor. Art by Andy Warhol and Peter Halley, alongside that of his Goldsmiths contemporaries, including Angus Fairhurst, Sarah Lucas, Rachel Howard and Jane Simpson adorn his home and are a reminder of days spent at Goldsmiths College.



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