Reconsidering Epistemological Limits: Damien Hirst and the Unbelievable Hauntograph

Abstract In 2017, British shock-artist Damien Hirst released a coffee-table book with photographs from his Venice Biennale exhibition, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, featuring artifacts retrieved from a Roman-era shipwreck in the Indian Ocean. The following year, a “documentary” was released on Netflix featuring the backstory of the wreck's excavation, showing how all those coral-encrusted antiquities made their way from the seafloor to the art scene. At this same time and elsewhere in Britain, a practitioner of art history, art, and maritime archaeology was in the process of developing the concept of “hauntography” as an object-oriented artistic method that represents (visually or otherwise) the ontological absent-presence of shipwrecks, that is, as objects that defy complete phenomenological access, while inspiring speculation into the uncanniness of being a thing of anthropogenic origin, but which persists beyond anthropos. Because both hauntography and Hirst's project make claims regarding epistemological and phenomenological limits pertaining to underwater wreckage, this article answers the question first posed by the author's students as to whether Hirst's satirical take on shipwreck archaeology ought to be considered the first hauntograph. By examining the relationships between two contemporary art projects, underwater archaeology, and object-oriented philosophies, this article considers how art objects might nudge epistemological limits without resorting to a post-truth dismissal of objective reality.