The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Damien Hirst · a cow and a calf, each cut in half lengthwise from nose to tail, each half suspended in formaldehyde solution in its own tank of glass and painted steel, four tanks in all · made in 1993 and first shown at the Venice Biennale of that year, in the Aperto section for younger artists · shown again in Hirst’s Turner Prize exhibition at the Tate in 1995 · the unit scored is one installation: the four tanks, the two animals, the gap between the halves of each, the parting of the two pairs and the title, as conceived and first shown in 1993; a copy with new animals in new tanks, dated 2007, is reported and is weighed on survival only, and the present state of the animals of 1993 is not verified
Mode
Sculpture made of the real thing, opened: two animal bodies cut along the midline and set in vitrines as an installation the viewer walks into
Mythos
The Madonna and Child, made in separation; the calf of the altar and the rite of passing between the halves, evoked; the anatomy theatre and the butcher’s shop
Phase
Made in 1993 and first shown at the Venice Biennale that year; shown at the Tate in Hirst’s Turner Prize exhibition of 1995; a copy with new animals, dated 2007, is reported; scored as the work of 1993
Presentation
Four tanks of glass and painted steel, two large and two small, the halves of each animal side by side with a gap between, cut faces to the gap, the two pairs apart, the liquid pale green and the light even
Register
A shock at the first sight of the cut face, a strange beauty in it, then a cold, clinical calm
Scale
Two animals at life size, two cuts, four tanks, one passage in each pair, one word of division
Governing Proposition
A cow and a calf have each been cut in half lengthwise, nose to tail, and each half hangs in formaldehyde solution in its own tank of glass and painted steel: two large tanks for the mother, two small for the child. The halves of each animal stand side by side with a gap between them, the cut faces turned to the gap, so that a viewer walks between them and sees the inside of the body on both sides, at the height of their own. The mother’s pair and the child’s pair are set apart. The title lays the Madonna and Child over a section through organ, bone and fat, and its last word does double work: each body is divided, and the mother is divided from the child. The wager is that the opened body, real and at life size, will show what lies under the most painted image of love in Western art, and that the bond the title names is nowhere in the cut.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
In 1993 Damien Hirst, born in 1965, showed at the Venice Biennale, in the Aperto section for younger artists, a cow and a calf, each cut in half lengthwise from nose to tail. Each of the four halves hangs in formaldehyde solution in its own tank of glass and painted steel: two large tanks for the cow, two small for the calf. The cutting, the preservation and the fabrication of the tanks were done by others under the artist’s direction, and they are the work’s own making. The title is Mother and Child (Divided); it is also printed with a comma in place of the parenthesis.
The halves of each animal stand side by side with a gap between them, the cut faces turned to the gap, so that a viewer can walk between the two halves and see the interior of the body on both sides. The mother’s pair and the child’s pair are set apart from each other. The animals are at life size, and the cow’s tanks are more than three metres long. The steel is plain and painted, pitched to recede, and the light comes evenly through the glass into a pale green liquid.
Nothing in the arrangement is idle. Without the calf the title loses its child, and the work becomes an anatomical exhibit of a cow. Without the cut the animals are a natural-history display, whole and closed, with no inside. Without the gap the viewer stands outside the body instead of inside it. Without the parting of the pairs the last word of the title loses its second sense, and without the title the Madonna goes. What remains when everything idle is removed is close to a diagram: two bodies, two cuts, four boxes, a passage in each pair, and one word.
Movement II
The first sight is of the cow’s cut face, life size, lit evenly through the glass: the stomach, the coiled gut and the fine bands of fat held still in the liquid, bone and soft tissue severed in one straight plane. It is a moment of terror and of a strange beauty, the anatomical plate made actual. The cut is clean, a hard thing to do on a cow, and each half is matched so exactly to its tank that the two read as one body parted by a hand’s breadth of air and two panes of glass.
Then the walk. Between the halves the body stands on both sides at the height of one’s own, opened, and the viewer stands where the knife went. The cut runs through the face and the eye, the place where the animal looks out, and opens it. In the smaller tanks the same section is made through the calf, and its smallness carries the pathos the title asks for without a gesture: scale alone does it. The height comes twice, once for each animal.
It does not come again at the same pitch. The elevation is a shock of recognition, and on return the clinical register, the even light and the hard steel take the bodies back to display. What remains is a cold, clinical calm, a state more than a meaning. Return still yields details: the asymmetry of the two halves of each animal, the different light in the large and the small tanks, the calf’s organs against the cow’s. But the work’s propositions are few and quickly reached, and a viewer who has stood in the gap once has had most of it.
Movement III
The title is a phrase from the altar and from the museum of painting, and it lays the most worked image in Western art, the mother holding the child, over two dead animals of the farm. The arrangement builds against the image rather than alluding to it: two bodies, a large and a small, each split, the pair kept apart. The icon of union is made in separation. That inversion is the archetype the work constructs, and the cow and the calf stay particular, a mother and her young from a herd, not types.
Under the image the work shows a body, and the body is meat, organ, bone and fat in section, the same in mother and in child. The cut face shows every organ, and the bond the title names is nowhere in it: to see everything inside a life is to see nothing of the life. A third reading is allowed and not compelled. Mother and calf are parted by human use, by the herd and the slaughterhouse, and the viewer walking the gap takes the place of the knife.
Other patterns gather at the edge. The calf of the altar, the sacrifice, and the old covenant of animals cut in two, between whose halves one passes, are summoned by the walk; the parallel to the covenant rite is striking, but nothing in the work fixes it. The disclosure is real and partly old. The anatomist’s table, the medical museum, Rembrandt’s anatomy lessons and the butcher’s window had shown the inside of animals and of men for centuries. What is new is that sight placed under the Madonna’s name, and in the viewer’s own space.
Movement IV
The last word does double work. Each body is divided, and the mother is divided from the child, and both senses are built in the one room. The law reaches everything: the title is itself divided by its parenthesis; the glass divides the viewer from the body; the gap divides the body round the viewer; the sacred image is divided from its flesh. The two most distant elements, a phrase of the altar and the cut face of a carcass, obey the same operation, and nothing breaks it. The territory is narrow, two bodies, four boxes and one law, and the operation is repeated rather than varied.
The form is the instrument. As a photograph or a drawing the body would be an image, and the knowledge that this is a real cow, dead, here, at one’s own height, would go. As one tank with the whole animal there would be no inside and no division; as one cut animal without the calf, no mother and no child. The cut plane is a window, and the glass both shows and seals. But the vitrine is inherited, shared with the maker’s other tanks, and a viewer who has read the label has much of what the work knows before entering.
Behind it stand the readymade and its vitrine, the Minimalist box and its steel, Koons’s tanks of the 1980s, the nearest precedent for the sealed liquid case, Bacon’s meat and cages, Beuys, Kounellis’s live horses, Nitsch’s carcasses, the natural-history museum and the anatomy theatre. Hirst’s own shark of 1991, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, had already made the wager on the dead animal in formaldehyde, and a sheep followed in the year after this work. The cut was the new move, the second step of a programme: the opening of the body. The stake was the risk of being taken for a stunt in an international exhibition, and it was partly paid in the public scorn of the middle of the decade.
Movement V
In 1995 the work was shown again, at the Tate, in Hirst’s Turner Prize exhibition, the year he won the prize, and it is the work by which that prize is remembered. It became one of the two or three emblems of the generation that dominated British art in that decade, a standard example in its histories, and a fixed point in the public argument over what art may be made of. It made the opened body of a real animal a viable sculptural material in the international gallery, and the viewer’s passage through it the event of a work. Its reach on later practice belongs largely to the tanks as a group and to the maker’s career, and much of what has been written about it concerns the maker, the market and the generation more than this thing.
Its material is a particular dead body. The bodies are perishable by nature, held in a solution whose long-term behaviour in large specimens has proved uncertain in Hirst’s tanks, where the medium has shown clouding and decay. A copy with new animals in new tanks, dated 2007, is reported; why it was made, and in what state the animals of 1993 now stand, are open. The form carries over whole: the arrangement, the cut, the title and the passage are a scheme, and a new body can carry a scheme. Replacing the body takes more than replacing a readymade, and less than losing a painted image.
The work holds the body in its full interior, the family as a pair and as a parting, the herd and behind it food and slaughter, the sacred in its title, science in its section and death in every part, all touched at once by one cut. It holds no person, no labour shown, no state and no history, and no consciousness but the viewer’s. Thirty-three years on, the form stands: four tanks in two pairs, apart, and whoever walks between the cow’s halves stands where the knife went, the mother opened on either side and the child, smaller, out of reach in its own divided pair.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test, part by part. Remove the calf and the title loses its child; the work becomes an anatomical exhibit of a cow. Remove the cut and the animals are a natural-history display, whole and closed. Remove the gap and the viewer stands outside the body, not inside it. Remove the parting of the pairs and “Divided” loses its second sense; remove the title and the Madonna goes. The steel is the plainest that will hold the liquid. Nothing is idle. What holds it below the top: the four tanks are close to a diagram, the necessity is that of a single proposition, and the reported copy with new animals shows that the scheme is required more than these bodies.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Disclosure through image, credited in full. What can be stated: the mother holding the child, the most worked image in Western art, has a body under it, and the body is meat, organ, bone and fat in section, the same in mother and child. A second statement: the cut face shows every organ, and the bond the title names is nowhere in it. A third, allowed and not compelled: mother and calf are parted by human use, and the viewer in the gap takes the knife’s place. These hold. Held below the gate because the first is a confrontation more than a finding, the second is the shared proposition of Hirst’s tanks since 1991, and much of what the room gives is a state.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Elevation of the dreadful kind, and it is real. The first sight of the cow’s cut face, life size, lit evenly through glass, the stomach, the coiled gut and the fine bands of fat held still in a pale green liquid, is a moment of terror and of a strange beauty, the anatomical plate made actual. The walk between the halves raises it, the body on both sides at one’s own height; in the smaller tanks the calf’s smallness carries the pathos the title asks for. The summit comes twice, once for each animal. What holds it this low is frequency and duration: a shock of recognition, which on return the clinical register and the hard steel take back to display.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Built in one part, evoked in the rest. The title sets on two dead animals the archetype of the Madonna and Child, maternal love made sacred, and the arrangement builds against it rather than alluding to it: two bodies, a large and a small, each split, the pair kept apart. The icon of union is made in separation, and that inversion is load-bearing. The calf of the altar, and the covenant of animals cut in two between whose halves one passes, are patterns the walk summons; nothing in the work fixes them, and they are not credited as built. The particular stays particular: a cow and a calf of the farm, not types. Held below the gate because only the inversion is constructed.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The inheritance: the readymade and its vitrine; the Minimalist box and its steel; Koons’s tanks of the 1980s, the nearest precedent for the sealed liquid case; Bacon’s meat and cages; the natural-history museum and the anatomy theatre; and the Madonna and Child of the altar. The departure: a real animal, whole and then cut open at life size, set in the gallery as sculpture, with the viewer sent inside it. The cut is the new move; the tank was not. Hirst’s shark of 1991 had made the wager on the dead animal in formaldehyde, so this is a programme’s second step. The stake, the risk of being taken for a stunt, was partly paid in public scorn. Held below the gate because the maker had opened the path two years before.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Substitute another form and the work loses most of what it knows. As a photograph or an anatomical drawing the body is an image, and the knowledge that this is a real cow, dead, here, at one’s own height, goes. As one tank with the whole animal there is no inside and no division; as one cut animal without the calf, no mother and no child. The form is the instrument: the cut plane is a window, the glass shows and seals, the gap makes the viewer what stands between the halves, and the parting of the pairs is the second division. Held below the top because the vitrine is inherited and shared, and the label gives much of what the work knows before one enters.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Evidence over promise, and the evidence is thirty-three years. The work has been returned to: the work of the Turner Prize of 1995, a standard example in histories of British art of the 1990s, a recurring case in writing on the body, death and the animal in contemporary art. Return to the object yields something: the asymmetry of each animal’s halves, the different light in the large and small tanks, the calf’s organs against the cow’s, the faces cut through the eye. But much of the literature is about the maker, the market and the generation, and the propositions are few and quickly reached. A viewer who has stood in the gap once has had most of it, and a work this young can only partly demonstrate depth.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Shown since 1993, so force and reach are scored together, in British and international sculpture of the early 1990s. The intrinsic force: it made the opened body of a real animal a viable sculptural material in the international gallery, and the viewer’s passage through it the event of the work. That is a real move, but it extends the tanks and stands on Beuys, on Kounellis’s live horses, on Nitsch’s carcasses and on Bacon; it amplifies more than it reorganises. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the work by which the Turner Prize of 1995 is remembered, an emblem of the generation that dominated British art in that decade, and a fixed point in the argument over what art may be made of. Its reach on later practice belongs largely to the tanks as a group, and is discounted.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole and legible; the arrangement, the cut, the title and the passage are carried as fully by the reported copy of 2007 as by the work of 1993. Presence: wide and continuous since 1993 in histories and exhibitions; fame is presence, not proof. Fabric: the bodies are perishable by nature, held in a solution whose long-term behaviour in large specimens has proved uncertain in Hirst’s tanks, and whether the animals of 1993 stand as first shown is not known. Replacing a particular dead body takes more than replacing a readymade, and less than losing a painted image. The span is thirty-three years; the charge on the fabric and the replacement takes it to the lower figure.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Judged as command of the medium, to the anchors every medium answers to. The medium is the vitrine, the preserved body and the room. Credited: the cut, straight and clean through bone and soft tissue alike, a hard thing to do on a cow; the matching of each half to its tank, so that the two read as one body parted by a hand’s breadth of air and two panes of glass; the plain steel, pitched to recede; the relation of large and small tanks, which carries the pathos without a gesture; the placing, which governs the walk. Charged: preservation is part of the medium, and it has shown clouding and decay in the tanks; and the range is narrow, one cut, one case, one arrangement.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the title, a phrase from the altar and the museum of painting, and the cut face of the cow, a thing of the abattoir and the anatomy laboratory. They obey one law, which is division. The title is divided by its parenthesis; each body is divided; the mother is divided from the child; the glass divides the viewer from the body, and the gap divides the body round the viewer; the sacred image is divided from its flesh. Every element makes the same move, and none breaks it. Held below the top because narrowness is not coherence: two bodies, four boxes and one law, and the range between icon and carcass is held by a single operation repeated.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The orders held: the body, in its full interior; the family, in the mother and the child, held as a pair and as a parting; the animal and agriculture, in a cow and a calf of the herd, and behind them food and slaughter; the sacred, in the title’s Madonna; science, in the anatomical section; death, in every part. They are integrated, because one cut touches all of them at once: the section is anatomical, butchered, sacred and maternal in a single plane. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no person, no labour shown, no state, no history, no consciousness but the viewer’s in the gap, and no natural order beyond the two animals. The low mark describes the form.
Score: 6.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form and The Imperishable at 8.4, then The Inevitable, The Swerve and The Inner Law at 8.2. A form in which the cut plane is a window, the glass shows and seals and the gap puts the viewer between the halves, so that a photograph or a drawing would lose what the work knows; a scheme whole and legible after thirty-three years, though its fabric is a body that perishes; an arrangement from which nothing can be removed without loss; the opening of the body as the new move; and one law, division, obeyed by every element from the title to the glass.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.6: the body, the family, the herd, the sacred, science and death are held in a single plane, with no person, no labour, no state and no history. Below the rest, The Sublime at 7.2: a dreadful elevation at the first sight of the cut and in the walk, which the clinical register and the steel take back to display. Next above it, The Bottomless Well at 7.5, a yield largely had at the first standing in the gap, and The Unconcealment and The Made at 7.7: a confrontation more than a finding, and a command exact and narrow.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 7.7, The Inner Law at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Imperishable at 8.4, The Swerve at 8.2, Pressure on Tradition at 8.0, The Archetypal Deep at 7.8 and The Unconcealment at 7.7 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.2, below 7.5, with The Bottomless Well at 7.5 exactly; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.6. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 93.9, an average of 7.825 that displays 7.8, 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 the work’s documented form, its arrangement and its record of exhibition; there is no text. The work scored is one installation: a cow and a calf, each cut in half lengthwise, each half suspended in formaldehyde solution in its own tank of glass and painted steel; the four tanks, the gap between the halves of each animal, the parting of the two pairs, and the title, Mother and Child (Divided), also printed as Mother and Child, Divided; as conceived in 1993 and first shown at the Venice Biennale of that year, in the Aperto section, and shown again at the Tate in Hirst’s Turner Prize exhibition of 1995. The cutting, preservation and fabrication were done by others under Hirst’s direction and are credited or charged to the work as its own making. A copy with new animals in new tanks, dated 2007, is reported; it is context, a later refabrication of the same form, and bears on survival only. What now stands is the form; the present condition of the animals of 1993 is not known and is not argued from. Hirst’s shark of 1991 and his sheep of the year after are named as the programme this work belongs to, and are not scored. No words are quoted but the title. Facts that could not be verified are not given or are stated as open, among them the dimensions of the tanks, the full list of materials, the width of the passage, the collection that holds the work of 1993, the circumstances and authority of the copy of 2007 and why it was made, and the condition of the first animals now.