Mother and Child Divided (pictured above) is a floor-based sculpture comprising four glass-walled tanks, containing the two halves of a cow and calf, each bisected and preserved in formaldehyde solution. The tanks are installed in pairs, the two halves of the calf in front of the two halves of the mother, with sufficient space between each pair that a visitor may walk between them and view the animals’ insides. Thick white frames surround and support the tanks, setting in brilliant relief the transparent turquoise of the formaldehyde solution in which the carcasses are immersed.
The sculpture was created for exhibition at the 1993 Venice Biennale and was subsequently the focal point of the 1995 Turner Prize at Tate Britain (then The Tate Gallery), the year that Hirst won the prize.
Damien Hirst Away from the Flock 1994
Tate Modern presents the first substantial survey of Damien Hirst’s work ever held in the UK. Hirst is widely regarded as one of the most important artists working today and has created some of the most iconic works in recent history. Sponsored by the Qatar Museums Authority, the exhibition provides a journey through two decades of Hirst’s inventive practice. It will also form part of the London 2012 Festival, the culmination of the Cultural Olympiad.
Artist biography: English sculptor, installation artist, painter and printmaker. He was a leading figure in the group of ‘Young British Artists'. He studied at Goldsmiths College, London (1986–9), and in 1988 curated the exhibition Freeze. His works are explicitly concerned with the fundamental dilemmas of human existence; his constant themes have included the fragility of life, society's reluctance to confront death, and the nature of love and desire, often clothed in titles which exist somewhere between the naive and the disingenuous. Dead animals are frequently used in Hirst's installations, forcing viewers to consider their own and society's attitudes to death.
Mother and Child Divided follows Hirst’s most famous work, created in 1991 for the British collector Charles Saatchi, a tiger shark floating in a giant formaldehyde-filled tank, entitled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Somebody Living. In the same year the artist filled two sets of shelves with fish in solution in individual Perspex boxes and titled the two separate works Isolated Elements Swimming in the Same Direction for the Purpose of Understanding followed by the bracketed words ‘left’ and ‘right’ indicating the ways the fish are heading. He also made his first works with ungulate carcasses in liquid: Stimulants (and the way they affect the mind and body), consisting of two cuboid tanks each containing a skinned sheep’s head and Out of Sight. Out of Mind, two individually encased skinned cows’ heads.
Damien Hirst Trinity - Pharmacology, Physiology, Pathology 2000
Damien Hirst Monument to the Living and the Dead 2006
In its reference to a mother and child, Mother and Child Divided subverts one of the oldest icons of Western Christian art – the portrait of the Holy Mother and Child traditionally the centrepiece of Catholic devotion. Hirst attended a Catholic school so the iconography is familiar to him, as he has commented: ‘I have a lot of strong memories of religious imagery. We had a big illustrated bible and when I was young I would go straight to the crucifixion or severed head pages.’ Instead of the joyful unity of mother and baby, which the traditional image celebrates, Hirst presents a mother and child not only forever separated from one another, but also fatally severed in themselves. The impossibility of achieving or retaining an idealised (lost) unity (often coupled with a fear of fragmentation) is a theme dealt with extensively in psychoanalysis (by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) in his 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and subsequently by Melanie Klein (1882–1960) and Jacques Lacan (1901–81) in various papers. It is the subject of several works made by Hirst in the early 1990s, with such titles as I want to spend the rest of my life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always, forever, now, in which a ping-pong ball floats on a jet of air above a structure made of panes of glass.
For Hirst, the bisecting and skinning of animals is about giving people the possibility to look in a new way. He has explained that cutting up cows and sheep is: like creating emotions scientifically. What do you do if an animal is symmetrical? You cut it in half, and you can see what’s on the inside and outside simultaneously. It’s beautiful. The only problem is that it’s dead ... In a way, you understand more about living people by dealing with dead people. It’s sad but you feel more ... a viewer should be intrigued. The work should attract you and repel you at the same time ... cows are the most slaughtered animals ever ... I see them as death objects. Walking food ... What’s sad is that if you look at my cows cut up in formaldehyde, they have more personality than any cows walking about in fields. (Quoted in Morgan, pp.17–18.)
Damien Hirst With Dead Head 1991
Damien Hirst Anthraquinone-1-Diazonium Chloride 1994
Damien Hirst
Tate Modern: Exhibition
Sponsored by the Qatar Museums Authority
4 April – 9 September 2012
Entry Ticket: £14
No comments:
Post a Comment