“I had been hired to photograph a town in the process of being erased. The American Electric Power Company had paid residents of Cheshire a lump sum to leave, never come back and never complain in the media or in court if they became sick from environmental contaminates spewed out by the AEP plant. The company was buying itself a lawsuit-free future.”

Having completed the project, Epstein could not get Cheshire out of his mind and embarked on a project called American Power. “I wanted to photograph the relationship between American society and the American landscape, and energy was the lynchpin.”

The result of the project is a set of images of the creation and consumption of power in America. The images starkly show how both energy production and its consumption are inextricably intertwined with everyday life in America.

Some of the images serve as somber reminders of the perverse ways in which America uses its power and its cultural relationship to these uses. One such photograph is that of a now disused electric chair affectionately known as ‘Old Sparky’.

Other images show the huge and irreversible impact that power generation has had on the landscape.

Just as revealing as the photographs themselves are the difficulties that Epstein encountered as he toured the country creating these images. He describes ‘systematic harassment’ as he tried to photograph power plants and other installations: “Law enforcement officials more than once ran me out of town when I had done nothing remotely criminal. The result was that from 2003-2008 – a span that coincided with the Bush era – most of where I went in the United States to work I went in fear.”

And, in case harassment was insufficient, here is a description of one incident when he was stopped for questioning: “..an unmarked car arrived. A middle aged man in a suit and tie stepped out and flashed his ID : FBI. “You know,” he said, “if you were a Muslim, you’d be cuffed and taken in for questioning.” Long live the land of the free!

The project is now the subject of an interactive web site that aims to collect people’s views and start an online discussion around the question – What is American Power?

Starting out as one of the now infamous YBA’s (Young British Artists), Hirst started to become well-off when he found that he could produce and sell in endless numbers paintings that were nothing more than a series of colored spots on canvas.

LSD

These paintings gave the first hint of Hirst’s skill at mocking the art world while still making money out of it.  He titled the paintings LSD and made clear that he only ever painted five of them himself the rest being done by assistants, particularly Rachel Howard.  “The best spot painting you can have by me is one painted by Rachel” he famously said.  Yet the collectors kept buying them and his assistants kept churning them out.

Sponsored by Charles Saatchi, Hirst went on to bigger things. He was claimed to have developed an obsession with death and started producing large works like his now famous dead shark in formaldehyde titled “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”.

To me it seems less of an obsession with death but rather an incredible skill to create enough hype and outrage surrounding his work to enable him and his agents use the mechanisms of the art market to make a lot of money.  Hirst developed this skill so well that he could produce anything and it would sell for large amounts in what had become an uncontrolled consumption mania.  For instance, “Lullaby Spring”,  a 3 metre (10 ft) wide steel cabinet with 6,136 pills sold for $19.2 million to the Emir of Qatar in 2007.

This approach culminated in his production of a diamond encrusted skull that he aptly titled “For The Love of God”.  I can just hear him chuckle – “For the love of God, how much can I get them to part with for this do you think?” The answer was $100 million – though that price was paid by a consortium that included Hirst himself.

For The Love Of God

In one final ironic act in September 2008, Hirst mounted, through Sotheby’s, an auction of his own work, bypassing his agents.  The auction was appropriately entitled “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” (by which I assume he means the checks he was going to collect) and included one piece that could not have been a more in-your-face mockery of the worship of the false god of consumption than a dead calf with gold hooves in a gold and glass tank of formaldehyde.  Titled “The Golden Calf”, the piece sold for $18.6 million.

The Golden Calf

If he could have orchestrated it himself, it would probably have been the finest work of art of his whole career.  But he didn’t.  It happened by chance.  The week that Hirst raised $200 million from his solo auction, Lehman Brothers collapsed and the whole financial system came crashing down.

To my mind, Damien Hirst’s career epitomizes our culture of utter waste and pointless consumption.  The world events surrounding his final auction were the perfect dénouement to illustrate the unsustainability of it all.  Hirst is one of the cleverest artists to exploit our blind consumption culture all the way to the bank and, in my opinion, he has always done it consciously and with a mockery that was barely veiled.

Of his various series, two stand out.

The first is called “Running The Numbers – a portrait of consumer mass culture“.  In these two series, Jordan takes a specific number of items – a number with meaning – constructs an image with these items then photographs the image.

For instance, Shark Teeth is a collection of 270,000 fossilized shark teeth put together to construct an image of two sharks.  270,000 represents the estimated number of sharks that are killed every day around the world for their fins.

"Shark Teeth" - Full Image

Detail of fossilized shark's teeth that make up the previous image

“Midway” is a series of photographs that is emotionally much more striking than Running the Numbers.  Jordan describes this series as follows:

“These photographs of albatross chicks were made on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.”

From Series "Midway"

From Series "Midway"

I find the contrast between these two series interesting.  Running the Numbers is essentially an intellectual exercise based on shocking statistics and converted into cleverly constructed images.  Midway appeals to our raw emotions. It is a simpler series that depicts terrible consequences of our consumption. Because it’s clever, Running the Numbers is probably more likely to appeal to the art establishment.  In fact, one piece was recently included in an exhibit at the Royal Academy in London about human impact on the planet.  But, if the objective of this art were not to appeal to the artistic elite but to convince people that these issues are important and that some action is needed, which of these two series is likely to be the more effective?  I know where I’d be putting my money.