I LIKE TO THINK of Damien Hirst as a very rich Walter Potter and his exhibits as a contemporary museum of curiosities—places where people encounter the most shocking and distorted forms of nature: sectioned cows, pickled sharks, glass-encased skeletons, and giant mosaics made entirely of butterfly wings. People are willing to spend millions of dollars on a single Hirst sculpture. In August 2007, he sold a platinum skull studded with 8,601 diamonds for $100 million. Nevertheless, he can create a sense of wonder (or repulsion or fear) in the minds of his viewers only if what he presents is convincing—at least perceived to be genuine. And for that he employs scores of artists, including "the woman behind the dead animals": Emily Mayer.
A year or so after the Potter's auction, Mayer invited me to the Tate Britain for the opening of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida." The name is from the psychedelic rock band Iron Butterfly's monstrously popular album of 1968. Apparently, Iron Butterfly's lead singer, Doug Ingle, was too stoned to say "Garden of Eden," and that title came out instead. It was a great name for the Hirst show because it, too, was a garbled Eden, one in which the themes of fear, desire, sex, death, and decay collided to form unsettling tensions.
When I arrived in Guilt Cross, Mayer was in the yard combing a collie that looked as if it had been coated in aspic. She was using a fork to extract silicone from its fur, which was an incredibly tedious process because the fork kept bending out of shape. "I've got to finish the collie and then get on with the dodo skeleton," she said, dipping the fork into solvent, which smelled like nail polish remover and cut through the cloying smell of silage and manure from the surrounding dairy farms. In addition to the fork, Mayer used a horse-hoof-trimming knife and a gynecological tool she called "a nasty instrument for taking smear samples from women." "I think this is a better use for it," she said indignantly. I groaned. One minute she's crass, and the next she's Mother Nature, looking up at the rooks swooping overhead (as she was now doing) and talking about global warming: "I have an issue with people saying animals are pests. I think the biggest pest on earth is us!"
On the train to London the next morning, Mayer considered how people would react to the huge slabs of beef she'd molded for the show. "I wonder whether or not they will think it's real. If anyone asks, [Hirst is] going to say they are real and changed every day. How important to the work that is, I don't know." It's very important, in fact. For Hirst, realism (or the illusion of realism) is what differentiates his work (and taxidermy, for that matter) from representational art and gives it the provocative edge he is famous for. His skeletons, sectioned cows, and bisected pigs are genuine, and to see them in a museum (out of context) is intentionally disturbing, exciting, and sad. The floating tiger shark, for instance, was inspired by the movie Jaws, because he wanted to show something "real enough to frighten you."
The Tate Britain is not very scary. We arrived an hour before the opening. Mayer dressed up looks nothing like Mayer in her grimy work clothes. She has on a green suede bolero jacket from France with a spider brooch on the lapel, mod blue mirrored sunglasses, and trim "city leopard" spotted pants. I followed her to the service entrance, where she handed me a badge that said TATE CONTRACTOR, FLYING BEAR LTD. I put it on, and we glided through security. Attending a Hirst opening as a contractor was nothing like attending it as a curator, art dealer, or critic. I felt like one of his artistic stagehands—the artists and technicians who work behind the scenes, enabling Hirst to put on his show.
And what a show he puts on. We walked under two rotundas, lit purple and yellow like a chic dance club, and into a hallway where Hirst was sitting with his crew. When he saw Mayer, he shouted, "Drum roll for Em-i-ly!" Everyone pounded on the table as Mayer approached Hirst, who hugged her. Reporters and television cameramen hovered around, waiting for interviews. People slapped Hirst on the back in a congratulatory manner. It felt as if we were backstage at a West End theater production on opening night, with Hirst the leading man. He was wearing brown-tinted sunglasses, a long sweater-coat with dragons embroidered on the back, and taut green leather shoes that looked reptilian. He has spiky salt-and-pepper hair and is half a head shorter than Mayer, who playfully hopped on his lap before she took off to chat with friends.
"She sounds like a man!" he said, smiling, as I opened my notebook. I laughed out loud. I considered what I knew about this man who had transformed himself from a working-class lad from Leeds into one of England's wealthiest men. He was born in 1965. He didn't know his birth father, and the father who raised him (a car salesman) left when he was twelve. He never forgave the Catholic Church for turning its back on his mother (a former florist with an artistic bent). As a kid, Hirst's childhood bedroom was an animal laboratory where he, like Mayer, bred and raised butterflies and other creatures. He is a Gemini ("I want to fucking share everything with everybody and have a party for the rest of my life") who loves the Beatles song "Two of Us." He has an insatiable fear of death (a 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 wings off them, they still enjoyed butterflies. "Sadly, no—not that much," Rose, a bubbly blonde, replied.
While Hirst's butterfly paintings move people with their beauty, his fly paintings (giant canvases coated with gobs of dead flies that resemble gooey raisins) fill them with dread. In the next gallery, Will Sheer, the artist who made Hirst's fly painting Night Falls Fast, stood in front of the huge black monochrome. A Hirst staple, the fly paintings represent a plague of sorts—Eden falls to desire.
"Will made this," boasted Sheer's girlfriend.
"We hatch them and kill them with fly spray. They die and we scoop them up, and they get mixed up with resin and stuck on the work. We paint them into place. We do it by the liter. There must be two hundred liters [of flies] in each piece," he explained.
"They stink!" said the girlfriend.
"I got used to the smell. They smell like moldy cheese," said Sheer.
Finally, Mayer and I headed over to The Pursuit of Oblivion, a crucifixion in a butcher shop. Only this butcher shop was in a gigantic fish tank filled with provocative props. What was being crucified was Mayer's sides of beef, which hang from meat hooks above a butcher block. The molded slabs with yellow marbling looked exactly like what you'd see in a butcher shop before the meat is cut into steaks. The butcher block did not; on it was a human skull, knives, a nautilus, and a frying pan filled with brains. An umbrella and strings of sausage dangled from above, swaying in the clear water of the fish tank like plankton.
The sculpture was Hirst's homage to a Francis Bacon painting called 1946. Bacon, the Irish-born Parisian exile, who died in 1992, has been Hirst's hero since he was sixteen, and I could see why. Bacon was captivated by slaughterhouses as "the absolute place of death": meat suspended as if crucified; meat with contorted mouths screaming in agony (he also painted monsters, bloody carcasses, crucifixions, and decomposing heads—consider Hirst without bathos or tropical fish). Bacon's shock tactics were meant to evoke the horrors of human existence. He painted 1946 at the end of World War II. As Bacon once famously said, "Well of course we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher's shop I always think it's surprising that I wasn't there instead." Hirst is more minimal: "Animals become meat. That's abstract."
I stared at the swaying meat. Tropical fish darted around a skinned cow head. British art critics called the piece chaotic and heavy-handed. The viewers that night were riveted, though not disturbed or even perplexed. Still, they were not without curiosity. Mostly they wanted to know if the meat was real. Even Hirst's dealer, Jay Jopling, owner of London's White Cube gallery—someone who knows Hirst's sleight of hand—gazed into the tank, mystified. "You just would never, never, never know," he said.
"That's fabulous! Amazing!" people cried.
The tank gargled. An eel twined around a fractured human skull, evoking a medieval apothecary. "That's a small shark, I believe," said a spiffy woman.
Another person said, "I don't know how it doesn't poison the water. All the bits and pieces. The water's completely clean. I think it's a model. Is that real meat? It might have algae or something?"
The week before, when Mayer delivered the piece, the museum staff thought it was a kitchen delivery. A scuba diver had to dive in and arrange the props. The gallery floors (directly above the Tate's library) had to be reinforced to support the weight of the massive glass tanks. "The last time I saw it, the water was murky, and the [cow] head was floating up to the top," Mayer said, smiling with pride.
I went back to see it a second time. A young man with sideburns and closely cropped hair stood inches from the glass. He admired the sculpture. He admired the beef. The man was Martin Gilder, and he knew the cut intimately, knew it better than an art critic. Gilder happens to be the owner of Martin's Meats, a large meat wholesaler and slaughterhouse and farm, which supplies the carcasses from which Mayer makes her replicas. If anyone here could discern art from life, it was Gilder the butcher. I asked him to critique it.
He shook his head. He flashed a big smile and examined it with the trained eyes of a master craftsman. Was it believable? No, he said, the color was off. But just slightly. "Needs to be redder. Should look wetter—even in water it looks dry." He laughed. "It's above average. It's what you call a very high confirmation; it's almost double muscle. It's graded a 'u-plus-one'—one is fat content. You could eat it, but it would need more fat to taste good."
He went on, "If you went back thirty or forty years, this wouldn't be shocking, because even a small village had a butcher shop and an abattoir. People are so far removed from how meat comes to your table. They see it beautifully packaged in supermarkets and don't associate it with animals anymore. What gives it away is the way it is hanging—all carcasses hang the other way around, because it's the way the meat pulls down from the hind legs and becomes more tender. Also, the neck would be much darker and redder."
Before Hirst's crew headed to a nearby pub, Mayer looked at the beef one last time: "I'm a little scrutinizing but happy. I love the way the fish are interacting with it." She bought the exhibition catalog. Hirst signed it:
For Emily.
Keep it real.
XXX
Damien Hirst
It was great to attend the opening with Mayer and to meet Hirst. But I still hadn't seen Mayer work. Another year went by. Then one day, the phone rang. It was Mayer. Her two terriers, Alice and Gus, had been mysteriously poisoned and died. (No: she buries them. Always.) She was deeply disturbed by this and also very sad. Then she said, "I have another cow here at the moment that I'm working on. And two cow heads that have to be cast as well." She invited me to watch her work. She sent me a link to help me find a cheap flight.
She was 372^ hours into the cow when I showed up in Guilt Cross. It was the week before Christmas. Half-finished Hirst projects lay everywhere: resin blood puddles, a fish skeleton in a vise, and two cow heads in the boiler room. But the first thing I saw when I stepped inside the workshop was a seven-foot-long black-and-white Holstein suspended from an I-beam. Its head drooped down as if it had been hanged. Its tongue stuck out comically from lips that were soft and black and fringed with stray whiskers. The cow looked dead—freshly dead—which it was supposed to be. Its glossy legs were artificially bent at the knees as if it were genuflecting or begging for mercy. Its chest cavity was split open. You could see its guts, its blood-red rib cage, its glistening milky yellow fat. It was horrific. It was beautiful. It was a crucified cow.
"How the hell did you make this?" I asked, unable to move for several seconds as I gazed at the most stunning, and the most terrifying, piece of art I have ever seen. It was the most alive dead replica imaginable, which of course sounds silly.
"You can see inside the cow—all the ribs and everything. That's all fake," she said. "You want to believe it's a cow in there and not just a black hollow cavity." Her tone was admonishing, as if I should know what the fake innards of a fake dead cow were supposed to look like. She lit a roll-up and thoughtfully inhaled. I stared transfixed.
Mayer had no idea what the client intended to do with the cow once it was finished, and I didn't pry, because I found it far more disturbing here in Mayer's studio than it would ever be anywhere else, especially a gallery or a museum where glass panes might separate it from me. Glass panes are barriers, which say in effect, "This is staged." Glass panes anchor a piece (and us) to the museum, a cultural authority, legitimizing it. Moreover, the glass separates us from death; it's a distancing element, providing safety, comfort, and, perhaps more important, a sense that someone is in charge of this death, someone with a respectable title that is not "taxidermist," such as "conservator" or "curator" or "philanthropist" or "scientist." But in here, in Mayer's workhouse studio, in this dark, wintry, isolated Norfolk farm country, the cow was eerie and surreal. There was no glass partition separating me from it, and I shivered with excitement and fear.
It was her fifth erosion-molded cow and her best. It is incredibly difficult to erosion mold a cow. Every scrap of anatomy must be preplanned. If she miscalculates, say, the catalyst times for the resin, the cow might cure improperly, and the fur is irreplaceable. The attention to detail is staggering. You can look up its nostrils and see bumps and hair. You can peer into its mouth at its pink-and-gray-ribbed pallet. Its big brown eyes are bloodshot near the irises; its fur-fringed ears are soft and translucent; its teats and asshole are embarrassingly convincing. All of that has to be worked out before the cow is slaughtered.
"Everything is fake except the hair, obviously. It's essentially a fake cow with real hair," Mayer explained.
The hooves?
"The hooves were cast with everything else. There's pink inside so you have that glow and depth and it looks like a living thing rather than a lump of solidness."
The teeth?
"I just cast the teeth in when I cast the whole cow. You can see the negative in the mold in the boiler room."
The eyes?
"They need to look fresh like it just died. I like them a little more glazed over."
Mayer still had to reattach the cow's head, fine-tune its face, and hide the seams. She also had to make fake intestines, because the work order called for guts to spill out of its body. Color photocopies of purple and yellow cow intestines lay all over the studio; she'd use them as a guide—like a high-tech paint-by-number—only instead of paint, Mayer would use a mixture of resin and flock (wool fibers that give it texture). She compared the process to painting on glass.
For this job, however, color photocopies alone wouldn't do. Mayer would need fresh reference, so she had the slaughterhouse open up a cow and photograph its hot intestines spilling out onto its hooves. The intestines were then frozen and delivered to her studio. Now she booted up her laptop and clicked on a file name, calling up the slit-open cow spilling guts. Then she clicked on another file (I'll spare you). She took a drag on her cigarette; the smell of smoke kept me from throwing up.
"Obviously, we didn't want it sitting on its ass, because that would look totally stupid!" she said with a snarl, clicking JPEG file after JPEG file. No, it was to be bent at the knees. But cows' knees don't bend ("Obviously!") unless you cut the tendons. With typical Mayer relish, she showed me where she cut them. "I just put a scalpel ... I just cut them from the insides just like a tiny old nick." The tongue had already been sticking out, but "I persuaded it a bit more."
Here's how Mayer cast the cow's body. Once the frozen cow was posed and coated in silicone inside and out (she intubated it and poured rubber down its throat), she bolted a thermoplastic support jacket with ribs over the outside of the body to hold the cow in place while the flesh rotted and the rubber cured. Once it had uniformly decomposed, Mayer pried off the jacket, peeled off the silicone, and implanted all the precast anatomy.
"You can do things most women never would," I said.
"I can do things most men can't do!" she said with a loud laugh.
While I was there, she worked for hours and hours reattaching the head, never pausing, not even for food. (Luckily, I found a pillowcase full of dried apple slices hanging on her husband's door and snuck upstairs periodically to eat.) By day three, I started to fidget and ask questions. "You could be doing this yourself in galleries and making quite a splash," I said, crunching numbers in my mind.
"Well, I couldn't, because I don't think of the ideas, do I? And if I went and showed this as a piece of art in a different context or whatever, I'd be like stealing, wouldn't I? I can't do that. I wouldn't want to anyway."
As it happens, the Uphall Dairy, a big commercial milk supplier, is right across the road from the workhouse. The next afternoon, Mayer suggests we go there to look at cows. She wants to observe cow noses, eyes, tongues, and topknots in order to perfect her facsimiles.
A ceiling of gray clouds hovers over us as we walk over to the huge milking sheds. They smell like manure and wet hay. "It reminds me of my childhood in the country," Mayer says. She is wearing a blue fleece jacket, black leather clogs, and torn jeans splotched with paint. When we pass the birthing field, Mayer spots a stillborn calf lying on the muddy ground. She stops to examine it with the unsentimental eyes of a scientist or a veterinarian. The industrial sheds, covered by corrugated cement-composite roofs, contain rows and rows of Holsteins. "Metal would be too noisy for them, wouldn't it?" she admonishes. I, her reluctant apprentice, nod sheepishly.
We walk along the side of a shed. Mayer narrates what she is seeing; she is teaching me how to look at cows. They are postcard perfect, black with wonderful white spots, tagged and numbered (yellow clips in their ears), wearing electric bracelets that monitor their milk production. They poke their bony heads through the fence, grazing, staring up at us with huge brown eyes. "They have great faces," she says excitedly. "When you start looking at them, each one is different. That one has bluish eyes. They've got different topknots—curly, straight. That one's kind of worn-out, really." Then she does a very un-Mayer-like thing. She gets all gushy, talking to the cows as if they were children. She grabs some hay and waves it under their pink and black nostrils, trying to get one to stick out its tongue for a photo. "I want to see your tongue, baby! Taste some hay!" she croons.
"That one's got a really short face compared to that one, which is long and broad," she says. I check out their faces. To me, they look alike, but I'd never say that to Mayer. So I look for variations: 00676's nose is more well-defined than 00758's, and 500211 has amazing wrinkles above its eyes. 00749 (mostly black) has a blue tongue. "That one has an orange nose, and that one's really pink. And that one is concave between the eyes," she says.
She gives a cow an "Eskimo kiss," rubbing noses with it. The cow's bony head is three times as big as hers is. "It's called Ray! Look! Look at the pink on that nose [00636] versus the orangy pink on that one [60075]! They can lick right up their nostrils. Look!" As if on cue, 60075 sticks its tongue up its nostril. Mayer bursts out laughing.
She leads me farther along the side of the shed. "Look how fat that gray one's nose is. It's like a boxer. It's quite narrow behind the nose, and the nose is broad, like it walked into a wall." Occasionally, she turns back to make sure I've noticed everything—all the nuances that enable her to excel at her job. "That one has a face like Alice [her late terrier]: she has a funny undershot jaw—the lower jaw is too far forward. Look at the shape of their bodies. I love cows! Look at how bony that one is! It's almost like a skeleton with the skin just hanging over it."
She pets the bony one's nose with the back of her hand. "They're friendly but don't like to be touched too much. The more you look at them, the more you can see. Some are really pretty, and some are quite brutish-looking. She's quite cute.
"I just want it to stick its tongue out for me, and it's gotten all shy," she says. The cow sticks its tongue up its nostril. Mayer snaps a photo. "You've got a ridiculously pink nose, don't you?" she gushes, extending her hand to another grazer. "Somebody lick me!"
000021 is an archetype: the perfect specimen, almost a cliché. "That's a beauty," Mayer says, eyeing me to make sure I've noticed all the variations—variations taxidermists live for and I am only now just beginning to perceive. "There! Are you seeing the differences now?"