Still Life by Melissa Milgrom (best ebook reader TXT) 📕

love of life, really) and a terrible curiosity about life forms, especially how animals look when taken apart and reassembled. He once said, "I just like rotting." He is an exceptionally brilliant namer, juxtaposing complex titles with simple images. Among the best is I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now (a Ping-Pong ball floating in the air above a spray gun and a glass stand). A known prankster, Hirst once got sued for wagging his penis at a Dublin restaurant. Now this art star was sitting directly across from me. My time was limited. I jumped in: Is taxidermy art?

"Yeah. I think anything done well is art," he said, and gave an example—cooking, I believe. "If you want to go from point A to point B, it's all about transport. Great transport." He paused and continued. "I just want to create things that look real. I think art is about life. You want things to reflect that—killing things to look at them. For me it's a love of life to explore it on the fringes. It's why kids take toys apart. It's a morbid fascination. It shouldn't be."

Q: A lot of taxidermists don't consider what they do art.

D.H.: They spend too much time creating hunting trophies and not enough on what they do. They should be more like Emily. I love her. She's brilliant. She's the only one who can create a sense of fantasy. She's the only one who can do what she does. She is on that level.

Q: Could you do what you do without Emily?

D.H.: I think I'd do it differently. I used to use real cadaver animals. If it looks real, that's all that matters.

Ever since Hirst won Britain's coveted Turner Prize for contemporary art in 1995 for Mother and Child Divided (a cow and a calf sawed into twelve parts and displayed in separate cases), the New York Times says the press has disparaged his work. This show, which also contained work by two of Hirst's former Goldsmith College classmates who rose to fame together in the early 1990s, was no exception. When I got home, I downloaded the reviews: "banal" (New Statesman); "This is not just paradise lost, but paradise never conjured in the first place"(Observer); "You can expect more in fact from the average truck driver" (Guardian); "Its real themes are pompousness, vacuity, big budgets, shot bolts, and the flogging of dead horses" (Financial Times). I wasn't brandishing the knife of a critic, however, but the magnifying glass of a child.

Yet, even I had trouble imagining that what I encountered in the first gallery was truly Adam and Eve. Lying head to head on two hospital gurneys were Eden's first man and woman—Damien Hirst style—with exposed, hyperrealistic genitals (prepped for surgery) visible through fig-leaf cutouts in blue surgical paper that covered their bodies. Adam and Eve Exposed, a one-liner the critics vilified, honestly didn't move me one way or another. Then the bodies started to breathe. Their chests rose and fell, rose and fell. I gasped, uneasily, then I went over to see something undeniably dead: a six-legged stillborn calf.

In His Infinite Wisdom reminded me of a Walter Potter freak—the conjoined pickled swine, actually—only supersized and strangely beautiful. Pristine and fleecy white with large black spots, it languidly floated in a glass tank as if in a cloud. The critics loved this unaltered (or so it seemed) piece for its power and simplicity. I figured the calf had been simply dropped into formaldehyde, but when I told Mayer that, she laughed. "Well, actually, quite a lot was done to that," she said, explaining how it had been frozen for fifteen years before she had defrosted and rehydrated it, then shampooed and fluffed it up. I wondered why it was considered art and not natural history. If the calf were displayed in South Kensington at the Natural History Museum, would it then become science?

Hirst's first formaldehyde piece, Isolated Elements Swimming in the Same Direction for the Purpose of Understanding (1991)—thirty-eight Plexiglas boxes, each one containing a fish—looked like science masquerading as art, a direct attempt to blur those boundaries. Similarly, the floating shark in The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) was Hirst's rendition of a "zoo that worked." "Because I hate the zoo, and I just thought it would be great to do a zoo of dead animals, instead of having living animals pacing about in misery, I thought that's what a natural history museum is really," he once said in a catalog. Even the sectioned cows evoked pathos in Hirst's mind: "I never really thought of them as violent. I always thought of them as sad. There is a kind of tragedy with all those pieces. I always did them where their feet don't touch the floor. They are floating things."

Mayer and I circled the exhibit. Everyone from Hirst's inner circle was here: Frank Dunphy, his business manager and accountant; Rungway Kingdon, the tall bearded Mauritian who owns Pangolin, the foundry that casts Hirst's huge bronzes; his assistants and independent contractors. At any given time, Hirst employs more than forty artists and technicians to do his behind-the-scenes work. Many of them were here in this room. They cast the resin pills for the stainless steel medicine cabinets (sixteen thousand pills in one piece), design the graphics for the pharmaceutical logos, and saw the sheep. People are often surprised to learn that Hirst doesn't paint a single spot on his signature spot paintings. Yet his name is on them all, just as it would be, Mayer explains dismissively, if he were Frank Lloyd Wright and she were Fred the bricklayer.

We chatted with the "butterfly ladies," the women who make his floor-to-ceiling mosaics of intricately patterned butterfly wings. Intense and radiant, these giant panels evoke a cathedral's stained-glass windows—macro-versions of Potter's pinned butterflies, only incomparably powerful. I asked the women if, after a year or so of pulling