Published on the occasion of Damien Hirst’s exhibition at L&M Arts, New York, in October 2010, this first--and complete--book on the artist's medicine cabinets is contextualized by the artist’s following of the punk movement. The first twelve sculptures in the book are named after the title tracks on the Sex Pistols’
Never Mind the Bollocks
album. The front-page newspaper spreads punctuating the book from the album’s release year (1977) and the year of the cabinets’ completion (1989) provide a context for reading James Frey’s story-poem,
Fuck This and Fuck That
, which describes the listless protest of a teenage waster.
The song titles and cabinet names -
No Feelings
,
Liar,
and
Seventeen
- resound with the frustrations of Thatcherite Britain and the violence borne out in daily uprest and anarchy, as depicted in the news: IRA MEN HELD IN BIG SWOOP; RIOT SHIELDS OUT AGAIN and DOCKS JOBS-FOR-LIFE TO BE AXED BY AUTUMN.
Hirst’s medicine cabinets have long been described as temples of medicinal hierarchies providing nothing more than a short-term cure in the face of death. Viewing the pervasive successes and exploitations of the pharmaceutical industry as a belief system in itself is evidence of our society's dependency and a form of escapism.
Hirst has commented: "I’ve always seen medicine cabinets as bodies, but also like a cityscape or civilization, with some sort of hierarchy within it. It’s also like a contemporary museum of the Middle Ages. In a hundred years’ time this will look like an old apothecary. A museum of something that’s around today."
The publication features a transcription of a radio conversation between Damien Hirst and Steve Jones, guitarist for the Sex Pistols, covering music, girls, money, drugs, drinks, and smokes. The book’s index lists every medicine cabinet ever made and the exhibition itself includes original Sex Pistols memorabilia including album sleeves and t-shirts.