Pharmacy

The test is subtractive, part by part. The cabinets are required: without walls of packaging there is no pharmacy, and the room depends on their number, since one cabinet is a sculpture on a wall and four walls are a shop you stand in. The insect-killer and the honey are required: they are the only living process in the room, and without them the work is a display of order with nothing to answer it. The coloured bottles are required as the shop’s old sign and the room’s link to the alchemical past of its trade. Less compelled are the furniture, the counter’s fittings and the footstools as such, and the sheer number of packages: the room is filled to the size of a room, a scale the format permits rather than the idea compels. Much of the work is set-dressing true to a type. Necessity holds, by a little.

Score: 7.6 / 10

What the room brings into the open can be stated. A modern pharmacy is a place of faith: a clean, coloured, repeated order that promises to keep the body from death and is believed without question, where art is questioned and not believed. The promise is made by packaging, design and display, the same means a gallery uses. And, through the honey and the insect-killer, the order on the shelves stands beside a death it does not prevent. The disclosure is made through space and credited fully: you enter as a customer would, and the realisation comes in the body before it is put into words. The meaning is real and holds. It is also one proposition, legible on first entry, and it reaches the person mainly as consumer and patient; the condition laid open is narrower than a human life.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The room refuses elevation as a principle of its look: fluorescent clarity, white and pale colour, the regulated rhythm of boxes. What height it has is cold and small. The coloured bottles glow like the windows of an old chemist’s, a domestic and faintly sacred light. The insect-killer’s blue tube and the deaths it makes are the one note of dread, and a quiet one, discovered rather than met. There is a chill in the completeness of the order, a whole wall of remedies arrayed against an enemy who is not shown. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the design itself: the room is built to be clinical, and it is, so that none of this rises far and nothing rises often. It sits above the bare refusal of a single readymade, since the room gives the eye more, and well below any painting that rises.

Score: 6.4 / 10

Two patterns are built, not only evoked. The first is the cycle of desire and death made literal: insects drawn to honey and killed by the light that also draws them, the bowls set on footstools at the height of a patient’s feet. It is the vanitas still life turned into a working mechanism. The second is the apothecary’s coloured bottles, which carry the pharmacy back through the alchemist to the oldest theory of the body and the cosmos (read as the four elements, as they can be, they hold that theory in the room) and set it beside the modern packaging that has forgotten it. Beyond these the myth is allusion: the pharmacy as temple, the chemist as priest, medicine as the church of a secular age. That reading is invited and widely made, but the room does not build it; the viewer brings it. Built in two places, evoked in the rest.

Score: 7.4 / 10

The inheritance is plain: Duchamp’s readymade; the shelves and display of Minimalism and its commercial heirs, Koons’s appliances in vitrines and Steinbach’s shelves; and the shop as artwork, from Oldenburg’s The Store to Kienholz’s walk-in tableaux. Hirst’s own medicine cabinets of 1988 to 1989 had already put pharmaceutical display in the gallery. The turn is to enlarge the cabinet into a room, so that the viewer stands inside the system of belief, and to add a living and dying element to an aesthetic of sterile order. That is a real step, and the joining of Minimal order to a vanitas mechanism is Hirst’s own. The stake was moderate: a young artist already backed after Freeze, working in a format his own earlier pieces had proved. The departure is from a near path, not from the tradition’s centre.

Score: 7.5 / 10

Here the form carries the knowledge. Change the room into a cabinet on a wall and the work loses what it knows: that you are inside the pharmacy, a customer in its order, standing where the remedies face you on every side and the insect-killer hangs over your head. The walk-in form turns a proposition about belief into the experience of being surrounded by its objects. The exactness of the replica is formal knowledge too: the room is close enough to a real dispensary that the frame of the gallery flickers, and the question of what is art and what is shop is put by the form, not stated beside it. What keeps the figure from the top is that the form is borrowed whole from its type. The knowing lies in the transposition, and the transposition is one move.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Thirty-four years of return. The work keeps its place in accounts of Hirst and of British art of the 1990s, in Tate’s displays and in writing on medicine and art. What return yields is limited. The first visit delivers the proposition; later visits add the honey and the insects, the old bottles and what they carry, the packaging and its brands now dated, and the odd afterlife in which the work’s name passed to a restaurant whose fittings became lots for sale. That last is the richest yield, and it lies around the work, not in it. Formal return yields the order of the shelves, which rewards looking more than one might expect, but not much more. Evidence of sustained re-examination is moderate, and much of the writing is about Hirst rather than about this room.

Score: 7.2 / 10

The intrinsic force: a whole commercial interior made into a sculpture of belief and mortality, with a living process inside a Minimal order. It is a real reorganisation, but a local one, since the readymade, the shop installation and the vitrine already stood. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within Hirst’s work the room is decisive, leading to the pill cabinets and the long pharmaceutical strand of his output, and giving him the name for a public venture; in the field it is one of the defining installations of the London scene of the early 1990s, and medicine and its packaging became common ground for later artists. But the field-moving works of Hirst’s are the animals in formaldehyde and the spot paintings, not this room, and no later work can be shown to descend from this room rather than from Hirst at large. Force above reach, both moderate.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Form first: the installation survives whole in Tate’s holding and can be shown as made, and its defining form is legible. Span: thirty-four years, short of the evidence the axis prefers. Presence is charged: a room installation is shown only at intervals and is not continuously in view, and in public memory it has been partly overlaid by the restaurant that took its name. Fame and price are presence, not proof. Fabric is charged a little: the honey, the coloured liquid and the insects are renewed at each showing, which is the work’s design and costs it little; the packaging is printed matter of the early 1990s whose brands date it, a surface fixed to its moment, which the axis names as a cost. The form stands whole, and the charges on presence and fabric hold the figure just below where its span alone would set it.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Command of the medium of installation, read to the same anchors as every medium. The making is the arrangement: packages ordered by kind, colour and size into walls of exact rhythm, the light, and the placing of counter, bottles, stools and insect-killer so that the room reads at once as shop and as composition. That order is precise and load-bearing, since the work’s beauty and its menace are both in the regularity. The hand is little in evidence: the fittings are fabricated, the packaging found, and the craft is decision and design, as with the readymade, but here with far more decisions and a whole space commanded. Measured against the masters, this is sound and exact command of a chosen means, not the load-bearing mastery of a Velázquez or a Mondrian, whose making is the knowledge at every square inch.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Take the two most distant pairs: the clean modern packaging and the old apothecary bottles; the sterile order and the honey with its dying insects. They obey one law, the pharmacy itself, a type that has held the alchemist’s coloured bottles and the manufacturer’s boxes in the same window for two centuries, and whose whole business is the body’s struggle against decay. The insect-killer belongs to the shop as hygiene and to the work as death; the honey is food, an old remedy and a lure. Every element is something a pharmacy could hold and something the work needs. The range is not wide, and narrowness is not coherence, but within its range the law governs without exception.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The orders held: the body and its sickness; medicine as science and as industry; commerce and design, in the packaging; belief, in the secular form the room proposes; the natural order, in the insects and the honey; and, faintly, the history of the trade from the alchemist to the dispensary. They are held in one structure, the shop, and not listed. Absent: the person as a consciousness, the family, the state, labour, history as event, and the sacred except by analogy. For a single room that is a fair reach, above a single found object and below the paintings that hold a household or a city. The low mark describes the form.

Score: 6.6 / 10