On the Way to Work

Publisher and industry reviews

Jacket review

'I want it to be revealing. I'll talk about anything you like. I want it to be truthful. Let's do it. There is no off-limits. I'm afraid of nothing.'

UK Kirkus review

So you really want to know about Damien Hirst, the 'ringleader and alpha talent of the most startling artistic developments in Britain for half a century'? Here's a book of 12 frank, free, F-word-rich taped interviews of Hirst by his friend Gordon Burn, liberally illustrated, which date from 1992 to 2000. But first you'll have to struggle to read it: Burn's pre-interview comments are photocopied paste-up strips, unevenly placed, the interviews themselves are in very small print on grey paper and there are typographic shocks and scrawls throughout. All this is no mere gimmick, however. Damien Hirst may express himself in the most anti-intellectual in-your-face way, but he is deadly serious about art. 'Great art is when you come across an object and you have a fundamental, personal, one-to-one relationship with it, and you understand something you didn't already understand about what it means to be alive.' For him the greatest artist of recent years is Francis Bacon. Hirst has had to deal with fame, money, the art-means-business world, and with becoming 'Damien Hirst', living as he says, in the firing line. His fight against hypocritical and phoney elements in art, artists, the media and the business world is unrelenting and often admirable. The fragility of existence and the action of the world on things were Hirst's great concerns from the beginning. His placing of objects in formaldehyde and big steel and glass cases is to hold off inevitable decay and corruption. The direction of his work has always been towards death. Hirst's Shark for Young British Artists 1 (YBA1) at the Saatchi Gallery in 1992, which was called 'The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living' (his titles are vital to his work) marked him out for instant notoriety. He has been pilloried for the brutality of some of his installations but comments: 'I make violent artworks. I think violently, I communicate violently. I'm not violent. I'm an artist. I really use violence as a way to communicate.' A great plus of this book is the many illustrations of Hirst's work, sometimes mentioned in the text, sometimes not. There are also some startling personal album photographs. It is a pity that - in keeping with the 'spontaneous' nature of the format and interviews - there is nothing as scholarly as an index, which would have been helpful, as there is much here that is revealing and valuable. Perhaps the book is designed rather as a 'freedom' experience in keeping with Hirst's idea that 'genius means that everybody isn't an artist. Freedom means that everybody is an artist... I think artists are normal people who have managed to harness somehow what is important for everybody.' (Kirkus UK)