The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Damien Hirst · an installation in a vitrine of glass and steel, divided into two chambers by a glass partition pierced with holes: in one chamber a white painted box from which flies hatch, in the other a severed cow’s head on the floor of the case in its own blood, with an electric fly-killer hung above it · made in 1990 · the unit scored is the one installation as a system running inside its case: the fixed apparatus of case, partition, box and fly-killer, and the perishable charge of head, blood, maggots and flies, which is replaced for each showing by design; between showings what stands is the apparatus and the cycle it is built to run, not the matter of any one showing
Mode
Installation as a working system: a process of life and death run inside the clean case of Minimalist sculpture, the vanitas made literal
Mythos
The cycle of generation and corruption, built; the box as womb and tomb; the beast of sacrifice, the lord of the flies, the place of the skull and the god who watches through glass, evoked
Phase
Made in 1990; shown for a season at a time, restocked with a head and live flies for each showing and dismantled after; scored as a system whose perishable parts are renewed by design
Presentation
A vitrine of glass and steel in two chambers joined by holes in a glass partition: a white box on one side, a cow’s head in blood on the floor and an electric fly-killer above it on the other
Register
Dread and disgust held behind clean glass; cold, continuous and close to awe
Scale
One case, two chambers, one partition, three active elements and one cycle, repeated for the length of a showing
Governing Proposition
A glass case is divided in two. In one room flies hatch from a white box; in the other a cow’s head lies in its blood under an electric fly-killer. The flies cross through holes in the partition, feed on the head, breed on it and die, many of them on the killer’s grid, while the head rots. The work does not depict the cycle of generation and corruption: it runs it, for as long as it is shown, in front of a viewer who stands outside the glass and cannot look away. The old disclosures of the vanitas, that what is born feeds on death and dies, and that someone watches, are not made new here. They are made actual.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
A Thousand Years was made by Damien Hirst in 1990. It is a vitrine of glass and steel, divided into two chambers by a glass partition pierced with holes. In one chamber stands a white painted box, and from it flies hatch, maggots being placed in it for each showing. In the other a severed cow’s head lies on the floor of the case in its own blood, and above it hangs an electric fly-killer. The flies pass through the holes, feed on the head, breed and lay eggs on it, and die, many of them on the killer’s grid. The head rots.
The box is the cleanest object in the case, and every living thing in the case comes out of it. It is a minimal cube of the kind the gallery had learned to offer the eye as an object complete in itself, and here it is put to work as a source: a womb and a tomb at once. Take it away and nothing is born; the head rots for an empty room. Take away the head and the flies hatch and die with no feeding, no breeding and no rot. Take away the killer and death comes only by age, slow and unseen. Take away the glass and the viewer is inside.
What could go without loss is maintenance, which belongs to the keeper and not to the argument. Every other part is required, and required as a kind: any head would serve, and any killer of the pattern. The work is a system and not an object, and its necessity is the necessity of a working apparatus. That is why it can be shown again and again with new matter in it, and why each showing is the same work. The scores here are for the installation with all its parts, the fixed apparatus and the perishable charge together, running inside its case.
Movement II
The partition makes two rooms and a passage. On one side is the room of birth, on the other the room of feeding and death, and the only way between them is through a hole in the glass. A life in this case is the crossing from one room to the other. It is the one event the work stages, repeated by every fly, and it is the reason the partition cannot be removed: without it the case would hold a swarm and a carcass, and not a passage from the one to the other.
Substitute another form and the knowledge goes. A painted vanitas, a photograph, a film of the same case would each show death, and none would make it happen in the viewer’s presence. The work knows what only a live system in a sealed case can know: that this death is now, that it will go on after you leave, and that you stood outside it watching. The glass makes the process visible and the viewer safe, and so makes the viewer a witness. The form is the knowledge, not its container, though the cube’s geometry is borrowed and its proportions could change without loss.
One law governs the whole: the containment of a cycle. The two most distant things in the case, the cold geometry of steel and glass and the head rotting in its blood, obey it, the one holding the process so that it can be seen and the other being the process. The box gives life into the case, the partition orders its passage, the head feeds it, the killer ends it, the glass keeps the viewer out. Nothing serves another purpose. The range between geometry and putrefaction is wide; the territory is one case and one cycle.
Movement III
The head lies low, on the floor of the case, and the killer hangs above it, so that food draws the flies upward into death. The placing is the work’s most exact decision. Death comes to most of the flies not by age but by an apparatus, indifferent, electric and audible, hung over the thing that feeds them. Its blue light is the one artificial colour in the case, and the crack of each strike on the grid is its one sudden sound. The composition tells at a distance: white box, dark head, blue light.
The elevation is dread, and it does not come once. Every death is another strike for as long as the case runs, so that the height is not a summit but a continuous low thunder. The response is closer to awe than to shock. But much of it is disgust, smell and fascination, the abject rather than the sublime, and the dread is a single note struck again and again, with no beauty and no transport beside it. It is a cold sublime of attrition, often reached and never high.
The archetype is built into the operation: the cycle of generation and corruption, birth, feeding, breeding and death, which the case does not depict but runs. The head is the feast and the corpse; the killer is the fate that falls on the many without choosing. Other patterns are only evoked: the slaughtered beast of sacrifice, the lord of the flies, the place of the skull. The particular stays wholly particular, a butcher’s head, bought flies and a catering appliance, and the myth is carried by the most ordinary means a kitchen or a slaughterhouse could supply.
Movement IV
The viewer stands outside the glass and watches, as a god or a farmer would, safe from the process and implicated in looking. This is the disclosure that belongs to the work itself: the case makes the watcher’s position part of what is seen. The others it brings into the open, that the head feeds what is born and what is born dies within reach of it, are the old disclosures of the vanitas and the memento mori. The work does not make them new. It makes them actual, and proves them true in front of you.
Its inheritance is the Minimalist box, the clean steel and glass of the gallery object, and the vanitas, death represented in a still life. Its departure was to join them and make the representation literal: death not painted or cast but occurring, now, to living things, in the box. The turn has close precedents in its own field. Hans Haacke had put living systems in cases at the end of the 1960s; Jannis Kounellis showed live horses in 1969; Beuys worked with a dead hare; and the caged spaces and carcasses of Bacon, to whom the work is constantly compared, stand behind it. The fusion is the swerve, and it is smaller than a first move.
The stake was real. A young artist staked an early showing on a rotting head in a case, liable to be dismissed as a stunt, and faced the practical and legal difficulty of showing it at all. The wager won fast. The vitrine of real death became an idiom of the decade, and through Hirst’s formaldehyde works, the shark of 1991 first among them, and the art of real material and shock that followed, it shaped what British art looked like in the 1990s and the market’s idea of what a contemporary work could be. Some of that reach belongs to the maker and to the patronage that carried his generation, not to this case.
Movement V
The title is the only language in the work, and it names a span that no fly in the case can know. The lives inside the glass begin and end within a single showing, generation after generation, and the title sets that round against something close to eternity. It is the one element that reaches outside the case, and it reaches toward time: the cycle as it runs this season, and the cycle as it has always run.
The work cannot be kept on a wall. To be shown it must be stocked with a head and live flies, and each showing depends on the supply of a head, the breeding of flies, and the law and the lender permitting both; it is shown for a season, under conditions, and then dismantled. Every living part is replaced each time, by design, and the killer and the case are industrial and replaceable. What survives is the cycle, not the matter. Its form is whole after thirty-six years, because the work is a system and its design stands; its presence is wide in reputation and intermittent in view.
The case holds the natural order, death, agriculture and industry, time and the act of watching in one process, and touches the sacred only by evocation. The person, the family, labour, the state and history are absent; the human appears as the beast that was killed and the viewer who looks. On return the case is never the same twice, the head further gone, the count on the grid higher, but its meaning is grasped at once and does not deepen much. Whenever it is set up again, the flies come out of the white box, cross through the holes, feed, breed and die under the blue light, and someone stands outside the glass and watches.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test, part by part. Take away the box and nothing is born: the head rots for an empty room. Take away the head and the flies hatch and die with no feeding, no breeding and no rot; the cycle loses its centre. Take away the killer and death comes only by age, slow and unseen, and the one sudden, mechanical and audible death is gone. Take away the partition and the crossing from the room of birth to the room of death, the one event the case stages, is lost. Take away the glass and the viewer is inside. What could go is maintenance, the keeper’s, not the argument’s. Held below the top because the parts are generic by design: any head, any killer of the pattern would serve.
Score: 8.5 / 10
What it brings into the open can be stated. Life and death are one closed exchange: the head feeds what is born, and what is born dies within reach of it. Death comes to most of them not by age but by an apparatus, indifferent, electric and audible, hung above the food. And the viewer stands outside the glass and watches, as a god or a farmer would, safe from the process and implicated in looking. These are meanings, disclosed through the thing, and the third is the work’s own: the case makes the watcher’s position part of what is seen. Held below the gate because the first two are the old disclosures of the vanitas and the memento mori, made actual rather than made new. The work proves them in front of you; it does not uncover a condition no earlier work had laid open.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The elevation is dread, and it is real: a rotting head in clean glass, a cloud of flies, the blue light of the killer and the crack of each death on its grid. The response is closer to awe than to shock, and it recurs, since every death is another strike for as long as the case runs, so the height is not one summit but a continuous low thunder. What holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve is the kind of response: much of it is disgust, smell and fascination, the abject rather than the sublime, and the dread is singular, one note struck again and again, with no beauty and no transport beside it. A cold sublime of attrition, often reached, never high.
Score: 7.5 / 10
One archetype is built, and it is load-bearing: the cycle of generation and corruption, the round of birth, feeding, breeding and death, which the case does not depict but runs. The white box is a womb and a tomb at once, a minimal cube from which life comes; the head is the feast and the corpse; the killer is the fate that falls on the many without choosing. That structure is the operation of the work, not an allusion in it. Other patterns are evoked, not built: the slaughtered beast of sacrifice, the lord of the flies, the place of the skull, the god who watches a world through glass and does not intervene. The title sets the cycle against a span no fly can know. The particular stays particular: a butcher’s head, bought flies, a catering appliance. Held below the gate because only the cycle is built.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The inheritance is twofold: the Minimalist box, the clean steel and glass of the gallery object offered to the eye; and the vanitas, death represented in a still life. The departure joins them and makes the representation literal: death is not painted or cast but occurs, now, in the box, to living things, and the viewer cannot look away from an actual process. Held below the gate because the turn has close precedents in its own field: Hans Haacke’s living systems in cases at the end of the 1960s, Jannis Kounellis’s live horses of 1969, Beuys’s dead hare, and the caged spaces and carcasses of Bacon, to whom the work is constantly compared. The stake was real: a young artist staking an early showing on a rotting head, liable to be dismissed as a stunt, against the practical and legal difficulty of showing it at all.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Substitute another form and what does the work stop knowing? A painted vanitas, a photograph, a film of the same case: each shows death, and none makes it happen in the viewer’s presence. The work knows what only a live system in a sealed case can know: that this death is now, that it will go on after you leave, and that you stood outside it watching. The glass is the instrument of that knowledge. It makes the process visible and the viewer safe, and so makes the viewer a witness; the partition with its holes makes a passage, so that birth and death are two rooms and a life is the crossing between them. Form is the knowledge here, not its container. Held below the top because the cube’s geometry, load-bearing as containment, is borrowed, and its proportions could change without loss.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence over promise, and the evidence is thirty-six years. The case yields on return in one real way: it is never the same twice, since the state of the head, the number of flies and the count on the grid change by the day, and each showing is a new run of the system. Its questions have stayed open: whether it is a work of art or a spectacle of killing, whether the viewer is witness or consumer, whether its meaning is mortality or the market, and what becomes of a work when every living part is replaced. What holds the axis among the lowest: the meaning is grasped at the first encounter and does not deepen much on the second, and the literature, though large, is mostly about the maker, his generation and the market, much less about this case. A well of moderate depth, shown over decades, not centuries.
Score: 7.5 / 10
The field is British and European art about 1990. The intrinsic force: it made the death of real creatures, in real time, the material of a gallery work, and set it in the cleanest form the gallery had, the Minimalist case. Less a reorganisation of possibility than a new and much-copied fusion of two available ones, which holds the axis down. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the vitrine of real death became an idiom of the decade; through Hirst’s formaldehyde works, the shark of 1991 first among them, and the art of real material and shock that followed in the 1990s, it shaped what British art looked like for a decade and the market’s idea of what a contemporary work could be. Some of that reach belongs to the maker and to the patronage that carried his generation, not to this case, and is discounted.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Span: thirty-six years. Form: whole and legible, because the work is a system and its design survives; the case, partition, box and killer carry it, and the head and flies are meant to be renewed, so that renewing them takes almost nothing from what makes the work. Presence: wide in reputation, intermittent in view. A work that must be stocked with a head and live flies cannot hang on a wall; it is shown for a season, under conditions, and then dismantled. Fame is presence, not proof. Fabric: every living part is replaced at every showing, and each showing depends on the supply of a head, the breeding of flies, and the law and the lender permitting both; the killer and the case are industrial and replaceable. Presence and fabric are charged, and the figure meets the bar and no more.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the same anchors as every desk. The medium is installation: the design of a case and the engineering of a process inside it. Credited: the division into two chambers and the holes that make the crossing; the head placed low and the killer above it, so that food draws the flies upward into death; the white box as source; proportions that give the event room and a clean ground; a system that runs for weeks with only a keeper’s feeding. The composition is exact, and the parts tell at a distance: white box, dark head, blue light. Held below the higher marks because the making is mostly by decision and specification, and the system is not self-sustaining but replenished. Load-bearing design, not a hand at its height.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the cold geometry of steel and glass, and the rotting head in its blood, the most formless thing in the case. They obey one law, the containment of a cycle. The geometry holds the process so that it can be seen; the rot is the process. Every other element obeys it: the box gives life into the case, the partition orders its passage, the head feeds it, the killer ends it, the glass keeps the viewer outside it. Nothing serves another purpose and nothing contradicts the law, not even the appliance, whose blue light is the one artificial colour in the case and death’s instrument. The range between geometry and putrefaction is wide. Held below the top because the territory is one case and one cycle, and narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The orders held, in one process: the natural order, as the biology of a life cycle; death, of the beast and of the flies; agriculture and industry, in a slaughtered head and an electric appliance from a kitchen or a butcher’s shop; time, in the cycle and in the title’s span; and consciousness, as the act of watching, which the glass makes part of the work. The sacred is touched by evocation only, in sacrifice and the watching god. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the person, the family, labour as human labour, the state, history and society. The human appears only as the beast that was killed and the viewer who looks. The figure describes the form, one case and one cycle, and stands above Fountain’s 6.0 because it holds the natural order and death as well as the institution.
Score: 6.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 8.6, then The Inevitable and The Imperishable at 8.5 and The Inner Law at 8.4. A form that knows what only a live system in a sealed case can know, that this death is now and that the viewer stood outside it watching; an apparatus from which no part can be taken without losing the cycle or the crossing; a work whose design survives the renewal of every living part, as it was built to; and one law, the containment of a cycle, governing everything from the steel to the rot.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.6: the natural order, death, industry, time and watching are held in one process, and the person, the family, labour, the state and history are absent. Below the rest, The Sublime and The Bottomless Well at 7.5: the dread is real and recurring but singular, much of it disgust, and the meaning is grasped at the first encounter and does not deepen much on the second. Next above them, The Made at 7.9: load-bearing design, by decision and specification, in a system that is replenished rather than self-sustaining. They are one fact: a single case running a single cycle, exact and narrow.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 7.9, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable meets the bar of 8.5 exactly, but The Swerve at 8.3 falls short by two tenths, and The Unconcealment, The Archetypal Deep and Pressure on Tradition, each at 8.2, by three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.5, which The Sublime and The Bottomless Well meet exactly) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 96.4, an average of 8.03 that displays 8.0, in the band of Tier IV and short of the 9.0 the summit also requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the work in its parts, its operation and its record of showing, from reproductions, descriptions and the critical account, not from timed observation of the case in operation; the dimensions, the fabrication, how the system is maintained during a showing and the conditions of loan are known less precisely, and where a judgment turns on them it is held more loosely. The work scored is one installation, made by Damien Hirst in 1990: a vitrine of glass and steel divided into two chambers by a glass partition pierced with holes, a white painted box from which flies hatch, a severed cow’s head on the floor of the case in its blood, an electric fly-killer above it, and the flies and maggots that run the cycle. It is scored as a system running inside its case. The fixed apparatus and the perishable charge are both parts of the work; the head, blood, maggots and flies are replaced for each showing by design, and that replacement, with any refabrication of the fixed parts, is weighed on survival only. What stands between showings is the apparatus and the cycle it runs. Hirst’s later vitrines and formaldehyde works, among them The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living of 1991, are context and evidence of reach, and are not scored; so are the precedents named under The Swerve. No words are quoted but the title. Facts that could not be verified are not given or are stated as open, among them the full list of materials and the trade name of the fly-killer, how the flies are fed, the catalogued dimensions, the number and size of the holes, the exhibition in which the work was first shown and the circumstances of its purchase, its later exhibitions, its present owner, who fabricated the case, how many heads have been used over its life, the licensing under which a head may be shown, the life span of a housefly, and the form of a companion vitrine said to have been made the same year.