- Venue
- Tate Modern
- Location
- London
Stepping through room after room of Damien’s iconic works an epiphany struck; here laid out before me was a visual discourse of Schopenhauer’s essay – The Emptiness of Existence. Damien reminds us repeatedly of our fragile and transitory roles as living beings within a physical world. Schopenhauer also explains this and tells us that to continue to live we have to have a constant need to fulfil our desires; to carry on existing we seek to satisfy our desires. However when a desire has been reached we are not truly satisfied; no longer does the desire exist and we have a need to replace it with another; this cycle is continuous. These desires revolve around basic needs for sustenance both for our bodies and minds in the form of food, for our physical existence, a need for reproduction and a spiritual pleasure to satisfy our mental capacities. When our needs or desires can no longer be satisfied our lives inevitably end. I know that in the depths of depression we see no reason to exist as we feel no desire for anything and I can understand it is not a physical inability for our bodies to continue to sustain themselves, but our mental inability to feel any desires which, if these desires do not return, force us to end our lives. We live to die and if there is no reason to live we must die.
From the first image encountered as you enter the exhibition of a young Damien Hirst; his head tentatively perched alongside another, the second a dead specimen of a rotund man. You know that Hirst is all too aware of the tentative gulf that exists, or rather exists so transitorily between life and death. The guide book tells us that his smile belied the fact that he was terrified. This connection with life and death bound him with a need to express our fragile tentative hold on mortality. The space between birth and death is unknown and it is this unknowingness of when we are to step out into the abyss of death and never return that terrifies us.
We are asked to face this terror when looking deep into the jaws of a shark in; The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991. We know the shark is dead; but it is on our level looking straight at us; we all know that this creature cannot strike out and reach us as it floats in its formaldehyde bath; but the knowledge of exactly what we are viewing and our imagination of what could happen faced with a live shark suspends our belief in the moment of looking that we are safe. We stare into the cavernous mouth and wonder with a flutter in our heart how we would feel facing this creature in reality. For a moment that is where we are; headlong facing death; about to be swallowed up into the mouth of a creature wishing to satisfy his needs and we feel the fear of the unknown; the fear of death.
For me one of the most relevant piece of work to Schopenhauer’s essay in this show is; A Thousand Years, 1990 – Enclosed within a large plastic vitrine the cycle of life and death is played out; maggots hatch within a white box then fly to seek out what they desire; sustenance and pleasure gorging on a severed decaying cows head placed in a pool of its own blood; only to return to the white box to reproduce; to lay their eggs and ultimately then to die themselves. The plastic vitrine plays out this performance repeatedly; the fast moving flies swarming around the decaying cows head. The sight of dead flies lying next to the slowly decaying head; itself slowly being eaten by the live flies, together with the smell of death emitting from a small vent in the side of the installation both repels and draws us in at the same time.
Other installations such as Pharmacy – 1992; where cabinets are filled with a multitude of medicines, reminds us that you can alleviate suffering and pain for only so long; ultimately death will beckon you to its side; there is no avoiding the truth of life that you must die. We just kid ourselves that we can continue to live and rely on our western medicine to return our bodies to a physical wellbeing in the vain hope that for every ill we shall ever feel there shall be a pill or cream to alleviate and banish the pain and suffering – all these medicines stem from our terror of pain and death.
I could not face my fear of the butterflies that were ensconced in two rooms in the installation – In and out of Love, 1991. Here the cycle of life for the butterflies exists from pupae to butterfly and finally to death. The thought of them silently flying to and fro around my head, occasionally feeling their fluttering in my face filled me with an irrational fear and I felt like I was being tested. It was this test that also led to the thrill of wishing to dare to enter, to peer within the rooms and face my fear. I failed and again I’m faced with the fact that although I consider myself a knowledgeable civilised rational physical being I know what terror is and I know the ultimate but inevitable terror for us all portrayed many times in this show is death.
