"Mother and Child, Divided" 1993, 208.5 x 332.5 x 109cm (x2), 113.6 x 169 x 62cm (x2) steel, GRP composites, glass, silicone, cow, calf, formaldehyde solution (Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo)

[ continued ]

The piece I thought of is Damien Hirst’s "Mother and Child, Divided", an item every fan of contemporary art should be familiar with. Composed of a cow and a calf the artist cut in two halves and conserved in formaldehyde, "Mother…" was unveiled in the Aperto Section of the 1993 Venice Biennale, won the Turner Prize in '95, and caused a major stir around the world. It is presently one of the highlights at the "History in the Making: A Retrospective of the Turner Prize" at Mori Art Museum (through 7/13). Other animals (or parts) in formaldehyde in Hirst’s oeuvre include sharks, sheep, and others.

When I heard about Hirst’s work for the first time, I asked myself, "How can this be art?" That was because when visiting Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry in 1991, I'd found two sliced bodies of a man and a woman displayed in a corner of the building, somewhat hidden behind the other exhibits. I remember reading that the relatively young black couple was "killed in a traffic accident in the 1950s, and dissected and displayed because they remained unidentified." One of them — I forgot which — was cut vertically, the other horizontally into slices of about one inch.

"The Skull Beneath The Skin" (2005), from the solo exhibition "New Religion" (Palazzo Pesaro Papafava, Venice)

The '50s were an era when the civil-rights movement started, and following the establishment of the civil rights legislation in '64 and later the black liberation movement, it was rather surprising to see (chopped-up!) corpses of colored persons in a public museum in the 1990s. In '95, the "Body Worlds" exhibition of body parts prepared with the help of plastination technology embarked from Tokyo on a tour around Europe, America and Asia. The show was for many people an occasion to get in touch with real corpses and anatomical specimen — things we rarely encounter in daily life. This was another event that sparked discussion about morality, but I don't want to list the arguments here. What I'd like to focus on instead are the similarities and differences between the (supposedly) academic exhibition of cut-up bodies — at "Body Worlds" and the Museum of Science and Industry — and the works of Damien Hirst.

Similarity 1: Both types of events were about dead bodies, which the contemporary human being rarely encounters in daily life.
Similarity 2: In both cases, the corpses were dissected and prepared for long-term conservation.

Difference 1: The displays at one event were human bodies, while those at the other were animals (non-human mammals).
Difference 2: Sheep and cows are particularly associated with cloning technology and such diseases as BSE.

"The Fate of Man" (2005), same as above

You'll surely find more if you want to, but I think the above sum up what it all comes down to. In the 1990s, issues like the safety of food or genetic manipulation suddenly became imminent, which is why especially difference 2 is quite an important point. Hirst must have detected this with his sensitive antenna, and translated it into forceful visual expression in the form of artworks. Dead animals symbolize not only their own death, but through their death (dead bodies) they hint at the potential to cause the death of us humans as well, so these are depictions of "death" in a double sense.

"The Fate of Man" (2005), same as above

"Death" is the central motif in Hirst’s work. The self-professed "hardcore atheist" explains in his own words, "I am aware of mental contradictions in everything, like: I am going to die and I want to live for ever. I can't escape the fact and I can't let go of the desire." ( ref. )  "There’s that great Gauguin picture, 'Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?' I think that’s the big question of art." ( ref. )  Hirst made several skull themed artworks, and gave a dead shark in formaldehyde the title "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living". Without room for interpretation as irony, the message is communicated bluntly: "memento mori". Tate director Nicholas Serota commented about "Mother and Child, Divided" as follows (in a lecture titled "Who’s afraid of modern art?" in 2000).

"Perhaps this is an essay on birth and death and on the psychological and physical separation between a mother and her child, especially given that the work was first made for an exhibition in Venice, a city filled with images of the Madonna and Christ child." Applying this idea to the sliced human bodies leads us to another pair of similarities and differences.

Similarity 3: Both exhibits are shown to an unspecified number of visitors.
Difference 3: One of them is presented with an artistic motif and idea, the other isn't.

"The Sacred Heart" (2005), same as above

This means that our case confirms the contextualistic, tautological definition of art, "Art is art because it is presented as art." By depicting "death" in the environments of art museums, Hirst presents the "memento mori" theme (along with that of the "deadly diseases" in difference 2) in front of the general public, which is exactly why his works qualify as art, but the "Body Worlds" displays and the sliced humans in Chicago don't. However, at this point I'd like to go back to my thoughts in part one of this text ("Out of Tokyo" 186). Doing so, I become aware of one crucial difference between the "long-term" aspect here (see similarity 2) and my own Rokkasho nightmare. Let me try to summarize.

Sliced humans and "Body Worlds": Long-term, without artistic motif/idea
Hirst’s works: Long-term, with artistic motif/idea
Rokkasho incident: Momentary, without artistic motif/idea

The works of Miyanaga Aiko and Mizukawa Chiharu, which I mentioned in "Out of Tokyo" 167 and 185, are clearly "with artistic motif/idea" (no matter whether long-term or momentary). I guess it’s safe to say that "artists incorporate motifs and ideas based on their own momentary experience and careful consideration, and create symbolic objects for others to relive the same (simulated) experience." In other words, art is not a trivialization of specific real events, but a representative act of subliming specificity into universality.

Nonetheless, Osorezan and Auschwitz, both of which have as little to do with artistic motifs and ideas as my Rokkasho experience, may not even be semipermanent, but they have been there for a fairly long time. Plus, excuse me if I repeat myself here, but most pieces of art look pale in comparison with the impact of such sites. Comparison is perhaps the wrong approach in the first place, but there’s still something inside me that doesn't seem to be satisfied even today.