Damien Hirst - 'Considered, Stubbed Out, Forgotten'
This sculpture by the artist Damien Hirst, is from his
"Cigarette Cabinet" field. It is a glass cabinet filled with hundreds
of cigarette-ends stubbed out along the shelves.
We, as people, create this cigarette routine like showed in
Damien Hirst's sculpture, but our cigarettes are scattered around the streets,
in bins, parks, paths and totally forgotten about. Damien Hirst put his
cigarettes (or someone else's) in that cabinet to show them from a different
viewpoint. Not in the streets being stepped on and rained on but all safe, in a
glass cabinet where they will stay the way they are. Don't get me wrong but it
sort of brings out the beauty in them. Damien Hirst created them into a memory,
they are not forgotten like all the other cigarette ends in the
world. After being smoked and left
behind they create nothing but a mess, Damien Hirst did the opposite and
assembled them together to give the impression of a bad habit in a brighter
light. To show there is something good behind something bad.
The way that the sculpture is made looks like the artist
just smoked a cigarette and stubbed it out on the little shelf and repeated the
process over and over again every time he had a cigarette, mindlessly and
randomly. However, that may just be the impression it gives and really, all
these cigarettes have been pre-smoked and the artist carefully placed them on
the shelves, exactly how he wanted to.
I like this sculpture because it reminds me of myself,
dropping cigarette-ends as I walk, soon after I drop them, I forget. It makes
me think of the cigarette-ends as people, people who get used for their
goodness who then get thrown away as if nothing happened.
This piece has a mood to it and that mood has a routine to
it, sort of like endless forgetting. You remember about something for a minute
while you do it and forever forget about it but then you do the same thing
again.
You pick out a cigarette from a packet, you smoke it, you
stub it out and you forget that it even existed, you pick out another
cigarette, and so on.
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