![]() Diners who were looking for comfort and ease on a night out were reminded that they were merely flesh and blood and that the food which they were eating was a mixture of chemical components keeping them alive, bringing them a degree of discomfort and disorientation along with their meal.Īll of these exhibits seem to laugh in the face of the inevitable end which we will all come to. The Victorians would have been surprised by what Hirst does but they were a society who made a flamboyant culture out of death and I think that they might have understood it, perhaps better than today’s society does.Ī whole room at the gallery has been made into an installation which “represents an echo” of the restaurant Pharmacy which was open from 1998-2003, completely designed and decorated by Hirst. They are carefully positioned and the colours have been chosen so that from a distance they seem to be lit from the centre. In Mantra (2007) the iridescent wings of butterflies have been taken and locked into shapes and patterns to form a new kind of beauty in death. Hirst grins out like the joker in Batman from a photograph, his face right next to a large jowly dead human head which looks disconcertingly like Alfred Hitchcock, a beautiful Carrera marble sculpture of an angel ( The Anatomy of an Angel, 2008) is partially dissected to show bones, muscle and blood vessels as well as a smooth outer shell of beauty, and there are cabinets full of anatomical models, and pharmaceutical tables and references throughout. There is no avoiding the subject of death in the rest of the exhibition either. The Anatomy of an Angel 2008 Carrera Marble 73.62 x 38.58 x 30.91 in (1870 x 980 x 785 mm) Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. I have no idea what I felt like saying when I looked at that lamb, but it certainly wasn’t baaaa. It made me feel enormous pity for the animal and for all of us. As for any religious overtones, lamb of God for instance, or a congregation of worshippers as a flock needing to be led, I have a feeling that this lamb is saying that you may well be kidding yourself about that too. Dead is dead and Hirst allows you no escape. You can project a sense of poignancy onto the desperately sad face, tilted upwards as it runs nowhere, but you are kidding yourself. The very thing that really made the lamb into a lamb has disappeared, never to return. Only the spark of life, the light in its eyes is gone. Everything that once made the lamb is still perfectly in place. This one has achieved its own empty kind of immortality in its box, it has been picked out and remembered, but what use is that to it? It is now simply a ghost of what was once there, a ghost recreated as a hyper real facsimile of what it once was. Farmers speak of each years lambs as a “crop” and they grow all too quickly and disappear off to slaughter unless they are lucky and are added to the flock. Their voices and calls were the background noise to my day from the hills and fields surrounding the school where I taught. I spent a long time looking at the lamb, and I kept going back to it as I walked around the exhibition of Hirst’s work at Leeds Art Gallery, maybe because I spent a long time living up in sheep country among sheep and lambs. She had never seen anything like it before. It was frozen between life and death, alone in its own space. She was not afraid or moved, she just didn’t know what to make of it. ![]() Live lambs are rarely still or silent and now her father was asking her to say baaa to something that was never going to baaa back at her. ![]() It was real, she could see that, but it didn’t move or make any sound. All her attention was on the lamb in front of her. Her eyes were wide and her mouth half open, and her hand reached out. I could see her face through the clear formaldehyde. She was staring into the case at the animal in front of her. “What do you say when you see a sheep? Baaaa!” All rights reserved, DACS 2011Ī father led his infant daughter up to Damien Hirst’s Away From The Flock, made in 1994, and pointed at it. Away from the Flock, 1994 © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. ![]()
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