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January 6, 2006
Red Alert
by Soren Wuerth

The Butchered Billfold

     The wallet lay open on the dusty road like the splayed carcass of a rotting fish.

     The guts of its rumpled pockets spilled fat folds of paper pesos. The woman who rented the palapa next to us picked up the wallet and leafed through a wad of bills.

     “There must be 10,000 pesos here,” she said. Roughly $1,000 in U.S. dollars.

     The billfold—alligator skin, well-worn—also held three credit cards, a receipt from a London cab company and miscellaneous slips of paper.

     The credit cards, business and personal, bore the name, “Damien Hirst.”

     We spent the rest of our day in Troncones searching for Mr. Hirst. A small Mexican town just north of Zihuatanejo, Troncones has rapidly grown in the last few years. Although he had arrived only recently, people knew Hirst.

     “The guy is frickin’ loaded!” Hans, a fellow Alaskan told us. “He sold some artwork for $2.4 million last year.”

     Everyone we talked to recommended we keep the money.

     Hans volunteered to drive us to Hirst’s spread in a beat-up van. Hans drove down a back road—a rutted, jungle path, passing his own cleared property. Equatorial weeds, vines and brush scraped the van as it jolted through dense foliage. 

     A half-hour later, we turned onto a wider side road and arrived at an enormous gate patrolled by three armed security guards. Hans pulled forward, yelled something in Spanish about Hirst, and the gate swung open.

     We pulled into the Hirst complex, a sprawling, landscaped beachfront estate, and walked into an open-air lobby littered with toys. A cluster of middle-aged people stood at a long buffet. Others surrounded a table like Jesus’ disciples. A short man with glasses and an open shirt noticed us.

     “We found your wallet,” I proclaimed, loudly.

     “Oh yeah, I was lookin’ for that,” Hirst said dismissively. He asked where we had found it. Someone laughed. “Get them some beer,” Hirst said, wagging a finger toward a cooler.

     The others continued with lunch as if the seven of us were a momentary distraction. The hall was part art gallery, part dining room, and part lounge, like the spacious lobby of an expensive hotel. Lining a wall were black and white stills from a 1930s Mexican film: a photo of two boys carrying another who appeared dead, one of a man in muted relief to a temple, a fuzzy picture of a naked woman who looked asphyxiated. A large painting showed two butchered cows.

     As we left, I shook hands with Hirst, catching, for an instant, his darting blue eyes. Then he picked up one of two cell phones on the table.

     I learned later that Hirst built his reputation, and perhaps his fortune, on controversy. He raised the scorn of Rudy Guiliani when he placed a dead lamb in a tank of formaldehyde. New York officials also threatened to ban his exhibit of a dead cow and dead bull copulating because they feared the effects of the rotting process.

     In the village, a day later, I took a photo of a farmer slicing muscles from a butchered steer. For rural Mexicans cow blood, fish, and pigs are a part of life, along with abject poverty. Hirst’s art gloats in fatal outcome:  the offense apparent to the cleaning woman who thoughtlessly removed his London installation of cigarette butts, an empty beer bottle and other trash in her evening rounds through a gallery.

     On the white strips of Mexico’s coast, poor mestizos, their packs heavy with hammocks and cheap jewelry, hawk wares to tourists. I saw an old woman with a few teeth limping along an oceanfront in the city. She had a mangled, poorly bandaged ankle.

     She approached an older American man with a golf shirt. He was gazing at a menu when she murmured her misfortune to him. He did little more than shake his head. His thick jowls swaggered like a cow’s udder.

     The hideousness of wealth inequality renders Hirst’s art frivolous, particularly in the land that produced Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. His butchered cow painting, hung in the sweaty hall, is as silly as the broken plastic Star Wars figurine lying on the ornate tile counter next to his fat wallet.

     Like any of his millionaire friends (Hirst’s buddy Elton John reportedly has a home next door with a triple-decker swimming pool), he could sponsor a movement in Mexico—like that of the Zapatistas—to build real social reform (democratic and socialist campaigns are gaining strength in Latin America, as evident in December’s election of indigenous hero Evo Morales in Bolivia). Private, western mansions could be turned into state-owned hotels.

     The rich may assuage their guilt with modest philanthropic donations, but their lavish seaside mansions reveal a preoccupying self-interest.

     Hardly common is art that generates political and economic controversy; instead we have artists like Hirst, whose work is of the kind that tickles the conversation of surfers and fundamentalists.

     For me, then, Hirst’s only real installment was the one he unwittingly dropped on a dirt road in a Mexican town of white haves and dark have-nots.

















Soren Wuerth is perhaps Alaska's best known community activist. He resides in an undisclosed location in rural Alaska and can be reached at soren@insurgent49.com.
- Columnists -

Editor's Desk
by Aaron Selbig

Red Alert
by Soren Wuerth

Alaskan In Exile
by Neil Zawicki

The
Bramble Bush
by Kevin Morford





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in-sur-gent (in sur'jent), n. 1. a member of a group which revolts against the policies of its leadership.