The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Damien Hirst · an installation in two rooms, shown as one work: in one, canvases painted white with pupae fixed to them, from which living butterflies hatch, feed on flowering plants and sugar water, mate and die over the run of the show; in the other, monochrome canvases in household gloss with dead butterflies set into the wet paint · made in London in 1991, when Hirst was about twenty-six · restaged at Tate Modern, London, in his retrospective of 2012 · the unit scored is the installation in its two parts: the butterflies, pupae, plants and sugar water are consumed by every showing and supplied anew by design, and what now stands is the canvases of both rooms and the procedure by which the living room is staged again
Mode
Installation of living and dead matter: painting made a habitat in one room and a grave in the other, run as a life cycle in real time over the weeks of a show
Mythos
Psyche, the soul and the butterfly in one Greek word; metamorphosis and the soul’s brief flight; the specimen as the soul held after death; the vanitas
Phase
Made and first shown in London in 1991; restaged at Tate Modern in 2012; the living parts supplied anew at every showing, by design
Presentation
Two rooms: white-painted canvases bearing pupae, with flowering plants and sugar water in warm, humid air; monochrome canvases in household gloss with dead butterflies set into the paint
Register
Wonder in the warm room and a chill in the other; the dread of still life rather than of terror
Scale
Two rooms, one creature, one cycle, one support
Governing Proposition
Two rooms make one work. In the first, pupae are fixed to canvases painted white; the butterflies hatch from the surface of the paintings, feed on flowering plants and sugar water, mate and die over the run of the show, and the room keeps hatching. In the second, monochrome canvases in household gloss hold dead butterflies set into the wet paint, their wings spread and still. The same support is a birthplace in one room and a grave in the other, and the title names the pair. The wager is that beauty in art is bought by fixing the living, and that a painting can be made to show it by giving birth.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
In 1991, in London, Damien Hirst, then about twenty-six, made a work in two rooms and gave it a title that names a pair: In and Out of Love. In one room, pupae were fixed to canvases painted white. The butterflies hatched from the surface of the paintings, fed on flowering plants and sugar water, mated and died over the run of the show. In the other room, monochrome canvases were painted in household gloss, and dead butterflies were set into the wet paint, their wings pressed flat.
The two rooms are one work, and that work is what is scored here. The butterflies that sit in Hirst’s later monochromes, one to a canvas, and the kaleidoscope compositions of whole wings that came after are a separate line of work, and they are not this; nor is A Thousand Years of 1990, the fly piece that preceded it. The living parts of the installation, the butterflies, the pupae, the plants and the sugar water, are consumed by every showing and supplied anew. That is the work’s own design, not a loss. What now stands is the canvases of both rooms and the procedure by which the living room can be staged again.
Each half needs the other. Without the living room the dead paintings are decoration, the butterfly as ornament; without the dead room the living one is a butterfly house in a white cube. The title is the hinge: in love, out of love, the living and the fixed. Inside each room the parts are working parts. The pupae are on the canvas so that the painting is the birthplace; the plants and the sugar are there so that the room is a habitat; the gloss is there so that the wing is caught as in amber. The colours of the monochromes are chosen for their chic more than compelled, and something could go; but nothing is idle.
Movement II
In the first room the painting gives birth. The white surface carries the pupae, and over the weeks of the show the butterflies open from it and fly through a white room kept warm and humid. It is wonder, of a kind few galleries give, and it is not a single moment: the room keeps hatching through the run, and the height recurs.
The knowledge is in the duration and in the life of the creatures. The room fills and empties over weeks; the butterflies feed, mate and die on its floor; the viewer stands inside a cycle rather than before an image of one. No painting, film or photograph could carry that. The work is known only by being in it while it runs, and the form cannot be exchanged for another without losing almost everything this room knows.
Part of the wonder is the wonder of butterflies, which any butterfly house gives. What the work adds is the frame of the painting, and the frame turns the wonder into an argument more than it raises it. The register stays at wonder, without grandeur. Its dread, when it comes, is the dread of still life, the knowledge that the room is a span that runs out, and not terror.
Movement III
In the second room the same creature is held still. The monochromes are laid flat and even in household gloss, and the butterflies were set into the paint while it was wet, so that the wing sits in the skin of the paint. Wings that will never move are pressed flat in hard colour: a beauty made of corpses, and the cold counterpart to the warm room.
Between the rooms the work brings something into the open. The canvas that is a nursery in one room is a tomb in the other, and the viewer’s pleasure is fed by the same thing in both: the aesthetic object is a killing jar. Beauty in art is purchased by fixing the living, which the collector of butterflies has always known and the painter has hidden. The killing is the work’s subject, and it implicates whoever looks. The further claim of the title, about love, is named rather than disclosed: the rooms show a life cycle and call it love, and nothing in them says what that love is.
The making is a command of arrangement and procedure more than of a hand. Staging a working habitat (heat, humidity, food, the timing of the hatch) is exact work, and the gloss is laid flat by design; the insects do the rest. One law governs the whole, the cycle from hatching to fixity, and pupa, flight, feeding, mating, death on the floor of the first room and the finished death in the paint of the second all obey it. Its range is one cycle, one creature and one support, and the distance between its farthest elements, though real, is short.
Movement IV
The Greek psyche is both the soul and the butterfly, and the work is built on that identity whether or not it names it. Metamorphosis from pupa to wing, the soul’s brief flight, the fixed specimen as the soul held after death: the plan of two rooms, one of flight and one of fixity, one of life and one of death, builds the old emblem into a floor plan. The particular stays particular: these insects, this paint, these weeks.
It is the most familiar emblem of mortality in European still life, and the work builds it plainly rather than deepening it. The vanitas, the oldest truth of the still life, is restated with live matter more than extended. The love of the title opens a further register, with Eros and Psyche close by, that the rooms do not construct.
The inheritances are the monochrome, the painting as pure surface, and the vanitas with its insects and its reminders. The turn is to put a living organism on the painting and let the painting be its birthplace, then to fix the dead of its kind in the paint of a second set, and to run the show as a life cycle in real time. Art with living things was older: Kounellis put horses in a gallery in 1969, Haacke made living systems in the late 1960s, and Beuys lived with a coyote in 1974. Hirst’s own A Thousand Years, of the year before, had already run a life cycle in a vitrine with greater force. What none of them did was make the canvas the creature’s birthplace and then its grave.
Movement V
In 2012 the work was restaged at Tate Modern, London, in Hirst’s retrospective, and the procedure carried it whole: the canvases, the two rooms, the hatch. The restaging also drew criticism over the death of the butterflies through the run, and since then the work has been discussed as a case in the ethics of using animals in art. Every future showing is now a decision, to be justified by a museum that must keep a supply of tropical pupae, a controlled climate and a willingness to stage the death of thousands of insects.
The butterfly runs from these rooms through much of Hirst’s later work, into the monochromes with single butterflies, the kaleidoscope compositions of whole wings and much of the market for them, and in the young British art of the 1990s the live organism became part of the vocabulary. Outside that the reach is thin, since art with living things had other and earlier sources, and fame and price are not reach. The return of thirty-five years has been narrower than the fame. The questions the rooms themselves raise, whether the beauty is complicit with the killing or exposes it, whether the living room is a painting, a habitat or a performance, how love belongs to it, stay open, and have been little pursued.
The form survives whole, as canvases and a procedure; the presence is thin, and the living half now needs a reason each time; the fabric, butterflies in gloss, depends on care. The work holds the natural order, death and the body, art and commerce, and names love; the person, the family, labour, history and the state are absent. Two rooms and one creature: in the first, a white painting opens and a butterfly flies in warm air; in the second, the same wing lies in the gloss, out of love.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the two rooms as one work. The subtractive test is clean at the top level. Remove the living room and the dead paintings are decoration, the butterfly as ornament; remove the dead room and the living one is a butterfly house in a white cube. Each half is required to make the other mean, and the title is the hinge. Inside each room the parts are working parts: pupae on the canvas so that the painting is the birthplace, plants and sugar water so that the room is a habitat, the gloss so that the wing is caught as in amber. What yields is the colour of the monochromes, chosen for chic rather than compelled. Nothing is idle, but more could go than in a work of high necessity.
Score: 7.8 / 10
What the rooms bring into the open can be stated. The aesthetic object is a killing jar: the canvas that is a nursery in one room is a tomb in the other, and the viewer’s pleasure is fed by the same thing in both. Beauty in art is purchased by fixing the living, which the collector of butterflies has always known and the painter has hidden. The gallery is a habitat it controls and a span it runs out. These are meanings, they hold outside the art world, and they are disclosed through living things rather than words. What holds the axis: the title’s further claim, about love, is named rather than disclosed, and the vanitas is restated with live matter more than extended.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The elevation is real and of two temperatures. In the first room butterflies emerge from the surface of a white painting and fly through a white room in warm, humid air: wonder, of a kind few galleries give, the painting literally giving birth, and it recurs through the run, since the room keeps hatching. In the second, the cold counterpart: wings that will never move, pressed flat in hard colour, a beauty made of corpses. What holds it: the register stays at wonder and a chill, without grandeur; the dread is the dread of still life rather than of terror; and part of the wonder is the wonder of any butterfly house. The frame of the painting turns it into an argument more than it raises it.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The Greek psyche is both the soul and the butterfly, and the work is built on that identity whether or not it names it: metamorphosis from pupa to wing, the soul’s brief flight, the fixed specimen as the soul held after death. The structure bears the load: two rooms, one of life and one of death, one of flight and one of fixity. The particular stays particular: these insects, this paint, these weeks. What holds the axis: the archetype is the most familiar emblem of mortality in European still life, and the work builds it plainly rather than deepening it; and the love of the title opens a mythic register, with Eros and Psyche close by, that the rooms do not construct. Built, but shallow-built.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Two inheritances: the monochrome and the Minimalist painting as a pure surface, and the vanitas still life with its insects and its reminders. The departure is to put a living organism on the painting and let the painting be its birthplace and habitat, to fix the dead of the same kind in the paint of a second set, and to run the show as a life cycle in real time. That is a real turn on the monochrome. It is not a new turn on art with living things: Kounellis put horses in a gallery in 1969, Haacke made living systems in the late 1960s, Beuys lived with a coyote in 1974, and Hirst’s own A Thousand Years of 1990 had already run a life cycle in a vitrine with greater force. Risked, and partly paid.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Substitute another form and the living room loses almost everything it knows. The knowledge is in duration and in the life of the creatures: the painting hatches, the room fills and empties over weeks, and the viewer stands inside a cycle rather than before an image of one. No painting, film or photograph carries that; the work is known only by being in it during its run. The pairing is formal knowledge too: the same support, the canvas, made birthplace and grave. Held below the top because the second room, taken alone, is a form painting has always had, the insect in the still life and the specimen on a board, and because the two-room plan that carries the argument must be found again at every showing.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Evidence over promise: thirty-five years, and the return has been narrower than the work’s fame. It is discussed as the origin of Hirst’s butterfly paintings, as an episode of the young British art of the early 1990s, and, after 2012, as a case in the ethics of using animals in art. Those are questions about the career, the market and the welfare of insects more than questions the rooms keep raising on return. What does yield: whether the work’s beauty is complicit with its killing or exposes it; whether the living room is a painting, a habitat or a performance; how love belongs to it. These stay open, but the literature they have grown is thin. What holds the axis is that thinness: a demonstrated yield, and a modest one.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The field is British and European art around 1990. Intrinsic force is moderate to good: the work joins the monochrome to a living system and to the vanitas in one gesture, and shows a painting that is a habitat, a reorganisation of what a painting can host if not of what art can be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: large inside Hirst’s own work, where the butterfly runs from these rooms into the monochromes with single butterflies, the kaleidoscope compositions of whole wings and much of the market for them; real in the young British art of the 1990s, for which the live organism became part of the vocabulary; outside that, thin, since art with living things had other and earlier sources. Fame and price are not reach.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over thirty-five years. Form: whole and legible. The work is a set of canvases and a procedure, and the procedure carried it intact from 1991 to the restaging of 2012; the replacement of butterflies, pupae and plants is how it is made each time and takes nothing from it. Presence: thin. The whole can be seen only when it is staged, and its living half depends on a supply of tropical pupae, a controlled climate and a museum willing to stage the death of thousands of insects; the criticism of 2012 makes every future showing a decision. The fame of the maker is presence, not proof. Fabric: butterflies in gloss paint are fragile, and the canvases depend on care. Both charges are taken, and a further charge for a renewal that is now contested.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Read to the same anchors as every medium: here, command of installation, of painting and of the keeping of living things. Credited: the staging of a working habitat (heat, humidity, food, the timing of the hatch), exact, and carried in 1991 and again in 2012; the gloss monochromes, laid flat and even so that the wing sits in the skin of the paint; the pairing of the rooms, white against colour, living against fixed. These are deliberate and load-bearing. What holds the axis: the command is of arrangement and procedure more than of a hand; the paint is household gloss laid flat by design, the insects do the rest, and nothing in the making rises to the load-bearing craft of the summit. A clean, narrow command.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: a butterfly flying in a warm white room, and a butterfly fixed in gloss in the other. One law governs both, the cycle from hatching to fixity, and every element obeys it: pupa, flight, feeding, mating, death on the floor of the living room, and the finished death in the painting. The title holds the law in a phrase. What holds the axis: narrowness is not coherence. The range is one cycle, one creature and one support, and the distance between the farthest elements, though real, is short. The two rooms are opposed by design, and the opposition is the law, not a breach of it. Coherent, and narrow.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The orders held: the natural order, as a real life cycle in a room; death and the body; art, as painting made habitat and grave; commerce, in the decorative value of the butterfly; and love, named in the title and carried only by analogy. One cycle integrates them. What holds the axis lowest: the person, the family, labour, history and the state are absent, and the sacred enters only by the old emblem of the soul. A two-room form built on one creature and one cycle cannot encompass much. The low mark describes the form and is not a judgment on it.
Score: 6.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.4, then The Living Form at 8.2, and The Sublime and The Inner Law at 8.0. A form that is a set of canvases and a procedure, carried whole from 1991 to 2012, whose renewal of its living parts is its design; a form whose knowledge is in duration, the painting that hatches and the room that fills and empties, which no image could carry; a wonder that recurs through the run, set against a chill; and one law, the cycle from hatching to fixity, which every element obeys.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.5: the natural order, death and the body, art and commerce, and love named by analogy, integrated by one cycle; the person, the family, labour, history and the state are absent. Below the rest, The Bottomless Well at 7.4: a return narrower than the fame, its questions more about the career, the market and the welfare of insects than about the rooms. Next above it, The Swerve and The Made at 7.6: a real turn on the monochrome after older art with living things and Hirst’s own fly piece, and a command of arrangement and procedure more than of a hand. They are one fact: a two-room form built on one creature, clear and narrow.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.2, The Made at 7.6, The Inner Law at 8.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Imperishable at 8.4, The Archetypal Deep at 7.9, The Unconcealment at 7.8, Pressure on Tradition at 7.7 and The Swerve at 7.6 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Bottomless Well, 7.4, below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.5. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 92.9, an average of 7.74 that displays 7.7, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of In and Out of Love, made by Damien Hirst in London in 1991 and restaged at Tate Modern in 2012, and of how it was made and received; not from standing in either room, and no image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the installation in its two parts as one work: a room in which butterflies hatch from pupae fixed to white-painted canvases, feed, mate and die over the run of the show, and a room of monochrome canvases in household gloss with dead butterflies set into the wet paint. The butterflies, pupae, flowering plants and sugar water are consumed by every showing and supplied anew by design; their replacement is weighed on survival only and takes nothing from the work. What now stands is the canvases of both rooms and the procedure by which the living room is staged again. Hirst’s later butterfly paintings, the monochromes with single butterflies and the kaleidoscope compositions of whole wings, are a separate line of work, and A Thousand Years of 1990 preceded it; both are context, as is the criticism of 2012, and neither is scored. No words are quoted but the title. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the place of the first showing in 1991 and how it was funded, the arrangement of the two rooms in that place, whether other objects belonged to the second room, the subtitles under which the two parts are catalogued, the present holder of the canvases, the number, dimensions and colours of the canvases, the species of butterfly, the dates of both runs, how often the whole has been shown, and the number of butterflies that died in 2012.