DEATH STARES US IN THE FACE through Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991). As we stand eye to eye with one of nature’s greatest killing machines, in awe of the jagged teeth that maul and maim, we are also aware that the life force that once animated this death-dealing predator has gone, and the formaldehyde in which it floats is merely delaying its decay.

As a teen, Hirst made repeat visits to a morgue; it was from those visits that the photograph With Dead Head (1991) derives—an image of the artist at age sixteen, posing with a severed head. By the time the photo was taken, mortality had already been his main fascination for some time. He has spoken about conversations with his grandmother when he was around age seven in which he came to realize that, even if you avoid accidents, you will die anyway. Like most of us, Hirst’s grandmother sought to delay the inevitable with various medications, which filled her bathroom cabinet. She agreed that after her death, her grandson could take and use any she left behind. These formed Hirst’s first medicine cabinet installation, Sinner (1998). As he later reflected on their conversations, he said: “Once I’d realized that [death] was a fact, and much more of a fact than God, religion, or any of those sort of things, or Father Christmas, then I used to just perversely think about it all the time. And I still do. But in a way, it makes life brighter: you go into the darkness and then get the hell back and feel invigorated.”

How we deal with death and what happens after, if anything, are among the central themes of the great religions, while how we live with the knowledge of that fate is one of the ethical conundrums we each face. Hirst’s work, therefore, has been ethically and religiously engaged from the get-go. In addition to his central focus on the inevitability of death, Hirst explores our efforts to prolong life, including the paradox that we kill other creatures as food in order to survive, the preservation and decay of bodies, death threats, and how we live in the light of our mortality. A cradle Catholic, Hirst frequently draws on Catholic imagery to address current political and social issues and to advocate for art as a belief system as worthy as science and religion. While not personally an advocate for religion, Hirst’s works do sometimes also allow for an orthodox religious interpretation.

Where Are We Going? Where Do We Come From? Is There a Reason? (2000–04) is one example. Seventy-six animal skeletons showcased in a curiosity cabinet confront viewers with their own mortality—a reflection the artist moves in an existential direction. The title alludes to Paul Gauguin’s famous multi-figure painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? But Hirst replaces “What are we?” with “Is there a reason?” His sculpture shows us the future—we are going to die—and his title compels us to reflect on whether any meaning can be attached to that reality. As Bob Dylan sang, “the answer is blowin’ in the wind.”

Hirst has spoken of a “fear of everything in life being so fragile” and of “wanting to make a sculpture where the fragility was encased.” Loving in a World of Desire (1996), in which a colorful beach ball is balanced on a column of air, is an example: if the air flow is interrupted, the ball will fall. That sense of fragility, symptomatic of the nature of life, becomes even more apparent in its companion piece, The History of Pain (1999), where, if the ball falls, it will be punctured by upturned knives on the base below.

In a series of installations such as the diptych Isolated Elements Swimming in the Same Direction for the Purpose of Understanding (1991), Hirst encases this fragility in glass museum cabinets, perhaps an attempt to create some sense of permanence in the face of his overwhelming awareness of the impermanence of all life. Formaldehyde preserves the bodies of the fish inside, offering an illusion of life underwater through beings that have already succumbed to death.

Though isolated in their individual compartments, the fish are arranged in an imaginary shoal, as if all swimming in the same direction, at once together and apart. Hirst’s use of repetition in these cabinet works links them to other installations with arrays of pill bottles, spots of color, or butterflies. Like Andy Warhol, Hirst is fascinated by the commercial and mass-produced, but where Warhol reveled in the beauty of repetition, Hirst seems to have a different end in view. His regularized shelves, cabinets, and color spots explore conformity of thought and action, as with shoals of fish all moving in the same direction, even toward danger and death. The fish cabinet Where Will It End? (1993) resolutely pushes the viewer toward the contemplation of mortality. As critic Sarah Kent has suggested, “Watching fish swim is said to soothe anxiety, but Hirst’s pallid shoal frustrates expectations—the fish simulate swimming in a poisonous medium and are inedible as well as lifeless.”

In regard to the fragility of life, Mother and Child (Divided) pushes the envelope in two directions. Originally made in 1993, with a copy made in 2007, the work comprises a bisected cow and calf displayed in four separated cases. It subverts the traditional Christian image of the Madonna and child, which depicts the bond between Jesus and Mary, a union of the divine and human. Here death eternally separates mother from child and divides each internally. Perhaps more surprisingly, his bisecting of these beasts also reveals the beauty of their internal organs—a sight only possible once death has come. Hirst explores a similar kind of beauty in Hymn (1999), a twenty-foot-tall version of a child’s human anatomy toy in painted bronze.

Hirst has spoken of wanting viewers to be both attracted and repelled by his bisected creatures because of this essential dilemma of beauty that can only be revealed in death—and his awareness that “cows are the most slaughtered animals ever.” He sees them “as death objects” and as “walking food.” For all the legitimate controversy over his use of animals in his art, Hirst makes an unexpected challenge to carnivory in Shut Up and Eat Your Fucking Dinner (1997), a gruesome re-creation of a butcher’s shop window that confronts us with the grotesque reality of meat processing—while its title nods to the paradox that human life has been built on the slaughter of animals for millennia. A deep look into vitrines like Shut Up has surely made more than a few viewers consider vegetarianism.

In practice, Hirst himself has been more hedonist than abstainer. In a 2018 Instagram post reflecting on Adam and Eve Under the Table (2005), he wrote that this sculpture of a bride and groom on the floor under a table piled high with empty bottles “was a bit of a self-portrait, I was beginning to feel drink was ruining my life” after an “amazing twenty-year party.” Interestingly, his turn to sobriety followed a 2006 show where his work was exhibited with some triptychs by Francis Bacon that, as noted by D.M. Delikat, “examined the drug-induced suicide of Bacon’s partner, George Dyer.”

Religion is, of course, another lifestyle choice that can be adopted in the face of the reality of death. Hirst’s principal exploration of religion is connected to his medical-cabinet installations, culminating in the room-sized Pharmacy (1992) and the medical silkscreen prints that make up the majority of his New Religion exhibition (2005–16). As Andrew Wilson writes, these pitch “an unquestioning belief in scientific rationalism—the conviction that pills can cure you—against the more subjective belief in religion and the redemptive healing power of God.”

Hirst often equates our belief in science and medicine with religious belief, depicting the former as a kind of unquestioning obedience, under which taking massive numbers of daily pills lets us enjoy a long life without fearing death. Infinity (2001), a large, mirror-lined cabinet of polished steel, contains shelves with thousands of hand-painted pills made of cast resin and plaster. Their medical inefficacy—they are replicas only—suggests that Big Pharma’s power lies in the unquestioning faith we place in science’s ability to cure our ills.

By standing outside such faith, Hirst’s art can depict an alternative. If, in Hirst’s words, science and religion can offer “the glimmer of hope that maybe it will be all right in the end,” why shouldn’t art inspire a similar belief? As Wilson suggests, “Without this belief in art, any sense of meaning is dissipated; it being through the artifice of art and its formal structures that the illusions of life can be recognized.”

Hirst’s work does, I think, support an understanding that contemplating mortality can help us find that “glimmer of hope.” His butterfly and spot paintings, in particular, move us in the direction of beauty and brightness, while Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, a large, complex installation about a trove of ancient works supposedly recovered from a fictional two-thousand-year-old shipwreck, is concerned with art’s ability to survive and captivate over millennia.

There are, however, works of Hirst’s that can bear a more orthodox Christian interpretation. When God Alone Knows (2007), Our Father Who Art in Heaven (2005), and The Incomplete Truth (2006) were exhibited at the Gagosian Gallery in 2022, they were grouped to form a crucifixion tableau, with the dove of the Spirit hanging above the central crucified sheep, while a shorn sheep clutching a rosary and the Book of Common Prayer between its hooves knelt in the place of the grieving Mary or John at the foot of the cross. Exhibited separately, these works have sometimes been called profane, but grouped together (as I noted in a write-up at the time) they exhibited “a greatly increased sense of the hope that Christians see in the violent sacrificial death of God.” Their poignancy of expression reminded one of the “once-for-all nature of Christ’s sacrifice, the sense that our violent actions and intentions are shown to be self-defeating—a literal dead-end—because after scapegoating and crucifying the Son of God there is nowhere else that our violent natures can possibly take us.”

It is worth remembering that two major influences on Hirst have been Francis Bacon and Paul Thek, both of whom have made significant use of religious imagery, providing Hirst with examples of ways both to secularize such imagery and handle it with devotion. Bacon, as Rina Arya has explained, “redeployed religious iconography to convey an experience of the human condition of animalism and mortality.” As with Hirst, Bacon’s recurrent and sustained use of religious symbols did not involve a simple dismissal of religious belief, although Bacon himself was an atheist. Arya notes that Bacon used religious images “to help him work out his vision of the world” and that, as a result, “they are intrinsic to his worldview.” Paul Thek’s Technological Reliquaries are known to have been an influence on Hirst. These are Plexiglas boxes containing convincing beeswax replicas of body parts and slabs of meat, an allusion to the sculptural containers Catholics have used for centuries to preserve the relics of saints, often including body parts. Of Technological Reliquaries, Ann Wilson writes: “Sexual dilemma, religious martyrdom, antiwar imagery—such layers of meanings and polyvalent metaphors constantly infused Paul’s personal autobiography with liturgical history and contemporary political statement, a complex interweaving that typifies all his work.” Taken together, Bacon’s use of religious imagery and Thek’s liturgically inspired works provide considerable insight into the complex interweaving that characterizes Hirst’s ethical explorations.

Bacon was once seen contemplating the maggots and decaying cow’s head of Hirst’s A Thousand Years (1990) for an hour or more. Bacon’s friend Lucian Freud observed that, with this early work, Hirst had “started with the final act.” Although Hirst’s media were very different from their own, these painters of mortal flesh understood that Hirst was an artist after their own hearts. Like Bacon and Freud, Hirst saw mortality and ruin in everything and everyone, but Hirst also explores ways art provides access to a form of eternal existence—an idea that does not feature in the mortality-laden work of the two painters.

For Heaven’s Sake (2008) is a life-size replica of a human baby skull cast in platinum and covered in 8,128 pavé-set perfect diamonds: 7,105 natural fancy pink diamonds and, on the fontanel, 1,023 white diamonds. This spectacular memento mori followed in the wake of a larger diamond-set cast skull, For the Love of God (2007), and was cast from a real skull that formed part of a nineteenth-century pathology collection Hirst acquired some years ago. These works in many ways sum up Hirst’s major themes: they make skulls beautiful with jewels popularly described as being “forever,” yet the skulls’ owners can no longer appreciate that eternal beauty. Their titles connect them to Hirst’s exploration of religion—and are also phrases used by his mother when contemplating his latest work. Hirst has said: “Diamonds are about perfection and clarity and wealth and sex and death and immortality. They are a symbol of everything that’s eternal, but then they have a dark side as well.”

Like his skulls, his butterfly images like Monument to the Living and the Dead (2006) and Doorways to the Kingdom of Heaven (2007) use art to create a new form of ongoing life for creatures whose lives have ended, by preserving the bodies of butterflies in arrangements that sometimes mimic stained-glass windows. Through his fearlessness in confronting mortality and his interest in making death a launchpad to beauty, Hirst is undertaking a secular form of resurrection and demonstrating the ability of art to puncture illusions while simultaneously creating alternative forms of reality. At the same time, however, the works’ liturgical titles, their church-window shapes, and the butterflies themselves—a familiar Christian symbol of the transformed and resurrected soul—all point to a kind of life that extends into eternity. Hirst’s subtlety as an artist lies in his ability to create works capable of sustaining both secular and religious interpretations.

Of his personal views, Hirst summed up the essence succinctly in a 2011 interview with Alastair Sooke: “That’s the difference between art and life. You can frighten people with death or an idea of their own mortality, or it can actually give them vigor, and they can go away and appreciate their lives more. I’m going to teach my children how to find the good things in life without being afraid of the finality of it.”

In a certain sense, our children give us a way to live on after death. It may be that Hirst also regards his artworks in the way of children, continuing his life into an indefinite future. Perhaps the vigor so evident in his work, which he sees as deriving from the contemplation of mortality, also relates to a concern for the artistic legacy he’ll leave behind. Or perhaps he’s unconcerned. In any case, like the monks who sleep in their coffins, he has proved he’s unafraid to look death in the face.

 

 

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Jonathan Evens is a priest in the Church of England and coauthor of a book on music and creative practice, The Secret Chord. His work has appeared in Artlyst, International Times, Seen and Unseen, and Stride and in anthologies including Finding Abundance in Scarcity (Canterbury) and Thin Places and Sacred Spaces (Amethyst).