my life as a artist
damien shirt and friends
Friday 9th January 2009 10:58 PM
Monday 19th January sees the opening of my next exhibition at Langwith College at the University of York. I'm sharing the space with two other artists, Hannah West, who paints moody lake-district landscapes and a bloke called Damien Shirt who's one of those irritating conceptual minimalists. Damien feels a bit insecure about the whole thing, mainly because he doesn't exist, so we've called the show 'Damien Shirt and friends' and I've written him a biography.
'Damien Shirt was born in Selby, Yorkshire, in 1969 and left school in the mid-eighties to work in the family fishmonger business in the town centre. His early artistic interests were focussed solely on music, taking a keen interest in all things percussive, and taking full advantage of the swinging Selby scene, Damien soon joined the moderately successful local 'new age romantic' group, 'The Quiche'.
In 1990, soon after moving to London on the promise of a record deal, the band split and Damien found himself living in a bed-sit in Ladbroke Grove and signing on the dole. Plagued by insecurity and feelings of worthlessness, Damien enrolled at the London College of Accountancy, seeking a broad-based qualification that he hoped could lead him into being a chartered accountant, auditor or maybe even a business analyst.
In 2000, having qualified and built up a successful business practice in corporate finance, Damien found himself plagued by security and feelings of worthlessness, and resolved to find a new direction. Inspired by the Tate gallery's recent acquisition of a tin of excrement for £22,300, Damien decided to become an artist.
Only two weeks after making the decision, he had his first major exhibition at the White Cube gallery in Hoxton, followed two weeks later by his first major retrospective at the same gallery. Surfing the recent Tate-inspired wave of public hunger for human bodily waste, the exhibition was entitled 'Wee-Wee', and consisted of two dozen twenty-millilitre sterilised plastic specimen bottles containing urine samples collected from various celebrities, including Janet Street-Porter, Sting and Virginia Bottomley. George Michael's early purchase of Janet Street-Porter's thimbleful for £12.99 served as a clarion call for good taste and discernment everywhere, and ensured the exhibition's subsequent sell-out to the tune of over £500.
Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery, said about the exhibition,
'Shirt's work is an examination of the processes of life and death and the ironies, falsehoods and desires that we mobilise to negotiate our own alienation and mortality, and yet in a more direct and compelling way, it's about wee-wee.'
Damien's continued his explorations into futility, and celebrity extracts, with 'Spit' in 2002, followed by 'Toenails' and 'Earwax' in 2003. Charles Saatchi said of Damien's 2005 show 'Dandruff',
'The implied human presence in the work gives one an overwhelming feeling of loss, emptiness and betrayal, and yet there is also hope and redemption in the quiet self-containment of the specimen bottles, and somewhere in there is an underlying encouragement to practice good scalp hygiene.'
Following a rapturous reception to 'Dandruff', Damien moved home and studio to the remote Yorkshire village of Riccal, where he has been working on new pieces for his much-anticipated show at York University, his first for over three years.'
His non-existence is proving more of a problem than we first anticipated and I've had to do some of his exhibits for him. Today I've prepared mainly tinned stuff, like 'adorable kitten's pineal glands in a rich tomato sauce' and 'pornography and degrading images in a rich tomato sauce'. Apparently some of Piero Manzoni's fabulously expensive tins of excrement were opened recently and found to contain plaster of paris. I don't know what they'll find in Damien's, but I'm sure it'll be in a rich tomato sauce.
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