It does not smell.
That is the first thought one has, standing in front of the shark. Inside the formaldehyde tank, the shark floats, caught in the posture of swimming. It is clearly dead, but it does not rot. It does not smell.
It is used in morgues. It is used in Hirst’s studio. It does the same job.
In a natural state, death is not a condition but a process. For something to die is the beginning of a long journey of decomposition into other things. Smell is the signal of that process. The signal that the boundary is collapsing, that the outline between this and that is blurring. Formaldehyde stops that process. The shark forever maintains the form of the moment it was caught swimming. It does not rot. It does not smell.
Does Hirst’s work exhibit death, or a state in which death has stopped being death?
In the same gallery, there is also A Thousand Years.
It is a work Hirst made in 1990. Two glass cases are connected, and in one side lies a cow’s head. Flies hatch inside, eat, mate, and die on an insectocutor. There is no formaldehyde. It is not suspended death. This is process, time, and actual decomposition.
Through the glass, the flies are visible. The ones crawling over the cow’s head, the ones flying inside the case, the ones already lying dead on the floor. The blue light of the insectocutor. Decomposition is progressing. And yet neither smell, nor sound, reaches outside the glass. In a space of designed lighting, after the ticket and the entry, one looks.
The viewer witnesses the process of death. Or does the viewer really witness it?
Perhaps there is a more perfect preservative than formaldehyde.
But is this Hirst’s problem? Glass and lighting and admission tickets are in every exhibition space.
In the middle of a dark room, the skull is shining. Viewers surround it. They frame the skull on their screens, check it, and frame it again. Whether the diamonds shine or the screens shine, one cannot tell.
For the Love of God. A work with thousands of diamonds embedded into an actual skull. Hirst described this as the human will confronting death. But is confronting death possible by placing the most expensive thing in the world on top of death? Is it confrontation, or concealment? And if that safety is given only to the person who can buy it, is what this work deals with death, or the ability to buy death?
If all art creates distance from death, Hirst’s work specifies how much that distance costs.
Writing, too, creates distance. It uses sentences instead of formaldehyde, creates paragraphs instead of glass cases, and fixes the name “Hirst” as the object of analysis instead of the shark. That the correspondence is precise means the object is already being controlled.
When this essay is finished, I will rise.
It does not smell.