Damien Hirst ‘stole live fly artwork idea' from course mate

Times

2 days ago

Damien Hirst has been accused of stealing the idea of using live flies for what became his breakthrough work from a fellow artist who went to his early grave unhappy at the acclaim his rival received.
Hamad Butt created Fly-Piece, consisting of live flies in a vitrine and described as one of the 'earliest works of bio-art in the UK' when it was put on display at his degree show in June 1990.
One month later Hirst, who was still an unknown artist and who had been studying with Butt at Goldsmiths in south London, unveiled A Thousand Years, which featured a colony of flies feeding on a cow's head.
Charles Saatchi, the renowned collector who became the leading patron of the Young British Artists (YBA) movement, had reportedly been blown away by the exhibition and shortly afterwards bought A Thousand Years.
Hirst then spent much of the decade producing bio-art including his Natural History series and, perhaps most famously, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, featuring a 14ft tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde.
Butt, meanwhile, died in 1994, aged 32, after developing Aids.
In the catalogue for a new exhibition of Butt's work at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London, the curator Dominic Johnson wrote that A Thousand Years 'appears to have directly appropriated from Butt'.
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'Friends and family recall Butt felt this was the case and that he was unhappy when Hirst's sculpture received greater acclaim,' Johnson, a professor of performance and visual culture at Queen Mary University, London, added.
Johnson said that Hirst 'likely encountered Butt's piece first-hand in its development' adding that Butt had produced a prototype in his studio in 1989. Their time as students at Goldsmiths overlapped for two years.
'Whether the appropriation was direct or not, Butt chose to withdraw the Fly-Piece from his subsequent installation [in November 1990],' Johnson said. 'The original vitrine is now lost'.
Hirst held two exhibitions in 1990: Modern Medicine, which opened in March and closed in May, followed by Gambler, which opened in July.
A number of observers, including Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of Serpentine Galleries, have stated A Thousand Years was at the later Gambler exhibition.
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Hirst's representatives said the artwork may also have appeared in the earlier Modern Medicine exhibition, held before Butt unveiled his Fly-Piece. However, this was still after Butt had developed his prototype while studying at Goldsmiths alongside Hirst.
Hirst declined to comment on the 'appropriation' claim.
Hirst, the wealthiest and arguably most influential living British artist, is no stranger to plagiarism claims. He has previously made a 'goodwill payment' to a designer and faced damages claims in American courts for alleged copying.
Hirst said in an interview with his fellow artist Peter Blake in 2018 that he had been taught 'to steal' while at Goldsmiths. He told Blake: 'They said: 'Don't borrow ideas, steal them',' adding that 'you can't get copyright on butterflies' in reference to his renowned Butterflies series of artworks. All my ideas are stolen.'
For the new exhibition of Butt's work at Whitechapel Gallery called Apprehensions, the artist's 'Fly-Piece' work has been reconstructed, which involved inserting fly pupae into a mound of compost at the foot of the vitrine. The pupae then hatch into flies and feed upon sheets of sugar paper printed with texts, lay eggs and then die.
While the 1990 exhibitions were the key stepping stones for Hirst's entry to the British artworld which he would dominate for the next two decades, Butt failed to break through.
The artist, who moved to Britain from Pakistan with his family aged two, had channelled his experiences — as a gay Muslim in the late 1980s with parents who tore his paintings down hoping he would choose a career in science — into his art.
A 1992 show of his work was mounted in John Hansard Gallery in Southampton by Stephen Foster, its curator, who described Butt as the 'closest thing I've met to a genius in my life'.
Two years ago Tate Britain gave space to Butt's Transmission work — whose original manifestation included Fly-Piece — in a display which critics said repositioned the artwork as a 'lynchpin in British contemporary art'.
Gilane Tawadros, the director of Whitechapel Gallery, said Hirst 'seamlessly weaves popular culture, scientific knowledge, artistic understanding and social and cultural insights into works which are poetic and edgy, and completely unlike any others made by his contemporaries at the time'.