Lord of the flies Hirst at the MFA, the Caribbean in Salem BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
	"A Selection of Works by Damien Hirst from Various Collections" At the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through April 24. "Island Thresholds: Contemporary Art from the Caribbean" At the Peabody Essex Museum, East India Square, Salem, through June 5.

The first thing you see outside the MFA gallery where Damien Hirst is enjoying his first solo museum show in the United States in more than a decade is a giant, round disc splattered with brightly colored paint. The disc is spinning, slower than a table saw but faster than the wash cycle of a washing machine. The title of the motorized painting is every bit as frivolous as the work itself, Beautiful, cataclysmic pink minty shifting horizon exploding star with ghostly presence, wide, broad painting. And yet like everything in this modest overview of Hirst’s career, Beautiful, cataclysmic serves a purpose. It acts as both sentinel and decoy; ushering us in, it sets up expectations about the rest of the show — that it’s whimsical, decorative, spontaneous — that the show does not meet. Instead, with the possible exception of a two-foot-square dot painting (Arginine) that dates from 1994, Hirst fixates on two themes, death and the inability of art to redeem or even address the human condition.

Hirst is best known for works that involve suspending entire animals in formaldehyde, and just past the glass doors that separate Beautiful, cataclysmic from the six pieces that make up the rest of the exhibit stands his 1994 Away from the Flock, a lamb floating in clear formaldehyde in a waist-high glass-and-steel case. I’m not sure what to make of Away from the Flock as a work of art other than that it was a lot more exciting to spot a flock of cedar waxwings a few hours earlier on a hike through Mount Auburn Cemetery. What I am sure about is the seriousness of Hirst’s efforts and his success at creating a meditation on mortality by way of some clever taxidermy. His direct emotional appeal cuts through the cynicism and the self-consciousness of much contemporary art. Frail, harmless, ordinary, this single lamb becomes a channel to the mystery of death. An octopus wouldn’t deliver the same message or have the same impact. Hirst’s greatest gift, if not as an artist at least as a thinker, may lie in his ability to make us consider the limits of life and art.

If offering up corpses as the material for æsthetic reverie makes you squeamish, then be sure to steer clear of Judgement Day, a seven-square-foot black "painting" — it looks like a wall of thick, shiny fleece — that’s made up of tens of thousands of resin-covered flies. A conceptual artist at heart, Hirst is mostly indifferent to color. Where or what the colors of Beautiful, cataclysmic are doesn’t matter, anymore than the color of the lamb matters in Away from the Flock. Yet his awareness of and attention to texture proves keen. For all its grisly material — it would be interesting to know just how the flies were procured and whether the artist actually had a hand in assembling the piece — Judgement Day holds up as a complex and perverse study of texture and scale. Up close, you can’t help scrutinizing the glistening, jewel-like contours where one miniature body becomes another. From a distance, you get the sense of being in on a sick joke as newcomers to the space discover that the monumental abstraction may once have been swarming over dung.

Judgement Day is Hirst’s most ambitious work here, and I’d argue the most successful. Its intimations of sound and movement make Away from the Flock seem stifled and static. And it refuses to be known at a glance. Whereas the rest of the show has the feel of full frontal nudity, Judgement Day is both subtle and seductive. Unlike the two other oversized mixed-media works on the walls, a hospital-sized cabinet of medical supplies (Is Nothing Sacred) and a mandala of butterfly wings (The Unbearable Likeness of Being), it asks to be looked at continually. Eerie and enveloping, it recasts the deceased into something reminiscent of life.

The show’s other major work, The Collector, an installation involving a mechanized scientist seated before a microscope surrounded by sliced fruit, cut flowers, and living butterflies, signals Hirst’s willingness to indulge in gimmickry. It may also signal something worse. There are two kinetic elements to The Collector, the occasional twist of the human figure’s wrist as he focuses the lens of the microscope and the actual fluttering of the surrounding butterflies. The eco system of the piece, with its growing flora and living insects, is maintained by the museum staff; the fruit is not rotting, the plants aren’t wilting. On the other hand, the butterflies will never see sunlight or rise on a breeze, and I couldn’t help thinking that The Collector represents Hirst’s version of The Truman Show, caging the living for fun and profit.

INSTALLATIONS OF A MARKEDLY DIFFERENT and gentler kind make up "Island Thresholds: Contemporary Art from the Caribbean" at the Peabody Essex Museum. The modest exhibit uses the sea as its uniting motif, with 13 works by four established artists who were born on the islands of Cuba (Kcho), Martinique (Marc Latamie), Jamaica (David Boxer), and Hispaniola (Tony Capellán) between 1946 (Boxer) and 1970 (Kcho).

Such a spare and focused exhibit wants to counter the proliferation of blockbusters — indeed, we need such shows. But offering a baker’s dozen of works by four men and billing it as "Contemporary Art from the Caribbean" hardly does justice to the 19 nations, each with distinct artistic traditions, that make up that region. Unless, of course, no women make art in the Caribbean, and no one worth mentioning comes from Puerto Rico, Haiti, the Cayman Islands, Guadeloupe, St. Croix, Barbados, Trinidad, Tobago, Granada, St. Vincent, Aruba, Curaçao, Anguilla, St. Lucia, or the Grenadines.

That said, "Island Thresholds" has a few standouts, most notably Tony Capellán’s 1996 Mar Caribe (Caribbean Sea). Capellán’s signature tactic is to subvert a single element of an otherwise familiar object so that it becomes portentous and unsettling. A few weeks ago at Samson Projects in the South End, his Dichotomy achieved that end on a small scale. The tiny hairs protruding from the openings of an arrangement of baby-bottle nipples turned out to be needles. What at first looked random and commonplace became calculated and ominous. A similar surprise is in store with Mar Caribe. The huge circle (144 inches by 192 inches) on the floor of overlapping salvaged rubber sandals in pleasing shades of turquoise and green suggests the surface of a swimming pool. Only after spending some time in the piece’s presence are you likely to realize that the thongs of the sandals are made of barbed wire.

My favorite work by David Boxer, a three-dimensional collage called Queen Victoria Set We Free, is both lovely and vaguely tragic. An African Fang sculpture stands between two panels of British Penny Red stamps on which convoluted drawings hint at skeletons and slave ships. And though I’m not sure how it relates to the sea beyond alluding to certain Caribbean cash crops, it was fun to walk through Marc Latamie’s shed. In Ajoupa, Latamie asks viewers to become sniffers by presenting strings of vanilla beans, rows of stainless steel dishes holding what smelled like nutmeg or allspice, and an assortment of thick chocolate-tainted tubers. Kcho’s gigantic installation Para Olvidar (To Forget), with its entire salvaged wharf and hundreds of beach-washed bottles, hovers between pretense and pointlessness; his 2003 video, L.Q.N.T.M.T.F, however, is hard to ignore. A man cooks a stew outdoors on the beach. A fire burns beneath a steel boat that serves as his stock pot, and you watch transfixed by the indelicate heaps of meat he throws in.