Dead body in a container by Susana Cook
Hirst, Damien. Mother and Child, Divided, 1993
Hirscht is reputed to be the richest living artist in the world. Most of his work relies in using animals as a metaphor for humans. I see his art as very consistent with the norm, relying more in signification and exploitation than in craft.
Mother and Child, Divided, consists of a cow and a calf each sliced in half, and put in a box full of formaldehyde solution. According to critics in this piece Hirst is exploring ideas of death. His artistic genius consists in ordering the death and cutting in half of a big amount of cows that will be exhibited in different parts of the world. The cut animals that Hirst presents in his exhibits usually begin to decay before the exhibit it’s over so they have to be replaced by new ones, making his art work a series of unnecessary deaths.
If the beauty of his craft would reside in the composition of the installation, a fake cow would do the trick. But the main part of his piece is that the cow is real, that it was killed and cut in half for the exhibit. So in this case the piece is a spectacle of cruelty and human supremacy over animals more than a piece of art in the aesthetic sense of the term.
Hirst explorations on death went onto bigger animals, in 2006 he exhibited a pickled shark. The piece was titled "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living". Hirst is inviting the audience to think about death. What is not clear is what is that he wants us to think about it. There are many thoughts we could have about death. The first one that comes to mind when watching his work is: the life or death of an animal doesn’t have the same value as the life and death of a human.
What interests me about this kind of art is the huge amount of meanings and significations that emanate from the piece and the way the art world decides to select the meanings in order to attribute value to a piece that ultimately reinforces and perpetrates the status quo and the constant exploitation and slavery of animals by humans. The selection of the artists that will reach fame is not innocent or arbitrary or based on talent.
Hirst has to overpass several regulations and laws in many countries in order to stage his work. The bans on British beef in Japan for example, stopped the cows at the airport in 2006. But every time he manages to bypass laws and regulations, the cows clear customs and the exhibit ends up taking place in very important museums around the world. This kind of work not only ends up getting all the necessary permissions and passports but it also gets highly rewarded.
Hirst is not the only artist torturing or killing animals as art work. The artist Marco Evaristti, for example, at Trapholt art museum in Denmark, put goldfish in a blender, and the visitors were given the option of pressing the “on” button. As a result many of the fish were of course liquidized. In August 2007 the artist from Costa Rica Guillermo Vargas featured a dog confined in a bare art gallery floor without food, water or bedding until it starved to death and after this exhibit he was chosen to represent his country at the Bienal centroamericana Honduras 2008. And the list goes on.
Why is it that humans are not a metaphor for humans? What would happen if Demain Hirst would exhibit the body of a human mother and her child cut in half in a box full of formaldehyde solution? What if we were invited to liquidized a fetus? What would happen if we were to trap a person in a gallery without food or water until she dies? The exhibits would certainly be banned, illegal and the artists would end up in jail. That would be considered murder. But killing an animal for artistic purposes is considered rebellious. It makes the artist respectable, filled with international recognition and rich.
Work cited:
Hirst, Damien. Mother and Child, Divided, 1993
Steel, GRP composites, glass, silicone sealants, cow, calf, formaldehyde solution; dimensions variable.
http://www.art-in-guelph.com/Pages/FishBlender.html
