Trouble, Tripled? Messrs Hirst, Fairey, and Invader Converge at Newport Street Gallery

Harry Laventure

Damien Hirst is 'challenging' the establishment by bringing a street artist into the gallery space. But given the gallery in question is his own, is the punch actually landing on the target's geographic jugular?

Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd

Gower Street Waterstones, 4.44pm. The cortado has gone cold. For the last fifteen minutes or so I’ve been on the phone between the buffets of UCL flaneurs and conversing street-side ornaments. The music of the place doesn’t really have a definable key-centre, but God’s local metronome isn’t ticking slowly. As one of those callers usually cursed to pace aimlessly, serendipity sincere puts a halt to my ramblings. At shin level for the average punter, stuck onto a little wall, there is a mosaic. This particular set of cyan and navy tesserae is recognisable as one of the street artist Invader’s calling cards. Most notoriously populating the various arrondissements of Paris, they had recently begun to sprout sporadically in the big smoke’s back alleys. The catalyst, Triple Trouble, I had attended the press view for only a couple of hours prior.

Featuring 155 collaborative works between Damien Hirst, Shepard Fairey, and Invader, Triple Trouble’s expansive set peppers every wall and floor space of Newport Street Gallery’s six rooms. Curated by Damien’s son Connor, the exhibition attempts to ‘explore the intersections of contemporary art, street culture, and pop iconography’. A few works from each of the artists’ back catalogues feature here and there, but the bulk of the collection is entirely new, the mutated residues of the last few years’ toil. Words like ‘provocative’ and ‘playful’ proffer the semantic field into which the gallery goer is meant to stroll, and remain as much tenets of each individual creator’s corpus as the exhibition itself.

Indeed, this confluence in thematic if not stylistic intent has clearly served as a fluorescent launch pad for the tradition-meddling ménage à trois. Regarding the new products themselves, there is no attempt whatsoever to pool, synthesise, or (perhaps more delicately) compromise the visual cues of Hirst, Fairey, and Invader’s distinct iconographies. Immediately on the right as one enters Gallery 1, a double portrait of The Clash’s Joe Strummer demonstrates this deliberate insolubility. On the left, Strummer features a primarily monochrome version of the singer. The background is littered with Invader’s vintage aliens, and each tile of the mosaic is punctuated by miniaturised versions of Hirst’s colour spots. The portrait’s sibling next door (Joe Strummer Style Clash) is immensely similar, but colourises Strummer in cartoonish blue and red shading, exchanging the colour spots for an imitation of Fairey’s archetypal Obama portrait (and helpfully adding ‘OBEY’).

The Joe Strummer diptych, with some other familiar faces. Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Artworks © the artists

Elsewhere these notions of blatant collaboration rather than overlapping invention are starker still. Gallery 2’s totemic Commanded Blossom is a thorough realisation of nominative determinism, a Hirst blossom background with a gargantuan OBEY logo painted on top. The effect is a gripping one, and it is charming to see these otherwise sacrosanct icons uncomfortably forced together, but little else is stimulated. Further still, Secret of the Deep places a three-dimensional realisation of one of Invader’s aliens in a formalin tank, behoving no obligation for pained explanation.

These formulations, like all others in the gallery, lean heavily on what the artists call ‘their shared fascination with repetition, symbols, and cultural icons’. I suppose this carefully orchestrated ‘urban visual language’ does address ‘the boundaries between fine art and street culture’, but only insofar as putting many elements from the latter into the setting of the former. Fairey is the founder of OBEY, a streetwear brand whose immense popularity exhibits an ear for the zeitgeist of skate culture et al. Invader is, quite literally, a street artist. Whether bringing them into a gallery is an alleged ‘challenge’ however, I cannot say. It may not be acutely self-aware for someone as established as Damien Hirst to claim a distaste for the establishment. Once more, given it is his own gallery, is the punch actually landing on its target’s geographical jugular?

The cynic could go further. There is certainly an argument to be made that the press-pack purported obsession with ‘symbolism’ that all three artists share amounts to little more than innovative branding. 155 iterations of the art often meaning little more than a recognisable, digestible callback to the three creators involved is quite a bludgeoning exercise in commercial indoctrination. Alas, are these really the fruits of ‘risk-takers and troublemakers who can withstand condescending, impolite jabs from supposedly polite society’, as Fairey suggests? As conveniently reticent as Hirst has often been, I do wonder precisely what artistic intent lies behind the line ‘I just wanted to change people’s minds, I didn’t even care what into, I wanted to lay eggs in people’s brains’. He also said much about upsetting people, so perhaps it is all going to plan. I hope that isn’t impolite - dare I say it, others won’t be so coy. They are simply better than this.

Branding overdose, or Obey/Invade. Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Artworks © the artists

I left Newport Street a little dumbfounded, but perhaps not as incensed as the above may suggest. One thing that persists throughout Triple Trouble is an acute attention to detail. Invade and Obey/Invade consists of a large, mirrored cabinet, housing hundreds of equidistantly spaced pills etched with the logos of their creators. Dissection Under a Microscope is a triptych of female portraits whose faces comprise of concentric circles in razor blades. To quote Fairey on the day, betraying an inflection of the clinical, the triumvirate ‘are pretty happy with the results’. In these examples, meticulousness reserves its right to jurisdiction over effect. Yet the direction of the effect beyond self-promotion, or lack thereof, is the immensely troubling aspect. In this case, tripled.

Triple Trouble is open to the public at Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery, 10am-6pm, until the 26th March. https://heni.com/exhibitions/triple-trouble