Tag: assemblage

likeafieldmouse:

Damien Hirst – Nothing is a Problem for Me Anymore (2011-12)

Hirst began work on the ‘Medicine Cabinets’ while in his second year at Goldsmiths with Sinner (1988). Constructing the MDF unit at home, he filled it with the empty packaging of his grandmother’s medications, which he’d requested she leave him upon her death.

Artist’s statement:

“You can only cure people for so long and then they’re going to die anyway. You can’t arrest decay but these medicine cabinets suggest you can.”

Joseph Cornell,Toward the Blue Peninsula: for Emily Dickinson, c. 1953.

Box construction. 36.8 x 26 x 14 cm. The Robert Lehrman Art Trust, courtesy of Aimee and Robert Lehrman Photo The Robert Lehrman Art Trust, courtesy of Aimee and Robert Lehrman Photography: Quicksilver Photographers, LLC © The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/DACS, London 2015.

“‘Toward the Blue Peninsula: For Emily Dickinson’ (c1953), a glass-paned wooden box with mesh framing a painted blue window looking out to open sky, references a deserted aviary and also the upstairs bedroom in Amherst, Massachusetts, where Dickinson wrote her poems. Like Cornell, Dickinson was reclusive, unmarried, untravelled. The bare room is at once a barred prison and a haven for contemplation and creation, and the work takes its title from a poem beginning, ‘It might be lonelier/ Without the Loneliness/ I’m so accustomed to my Fate’ and ending, ‘It might be easier/ To fail — with Land in Sight —/ Than gain — My Blue Peninsula —/ To perish — of Delight”.’

—Jackie Wullschlager