Meet Animal Meat - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Damien Hirst
Away from the Flock, mixed media, 1994 © Damien Hirst
Returning to Hirst’s Something Solid Beneath the
Surface of All Creatures Great and Small, there is
indeed “something” beneath the surface of
creatures. However, it is not necessary to open up
the animal in order to find it. The natural-history
display of skeletal forms exhibited by Hirst gives us
only the bare bones, but not the solidity of the
animal’s “something”—its space apart from
human perception. Following Goethe, this
something of the animal is an open secret. Hirst’s
works are a series of structures around the limits of
access to this secret approached through the
tradition of lifting nature’s veil.
References
[i] Luke White, Damien Hirst and the Legacy of the Sublime in Contemporary
Art and Culture (London: Middlesex University, forthcoming).
[ii] Damien Hirst, I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with
Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now (New York: Monacelli Press,
1997), 298.
[iii] Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of an Idea, trans.
Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), 8.
[iv] Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the
Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row 1980), 168–69.
[v] Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael
Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 81; Hadot,
The Veil of Isis, 93.
70
[viii] Simon Lumsden, "Hegel, Derrida and the Subject," Cosmos and History:
[vi] Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. 4, ed. James Spedding,
Robert Leslie Ellis et al. (London: Longman,1875), 296.
[vii] Merchant, The Death of Nature, 168–69.The Journal of Natural and Social
Philosophy 3, nos. 2–3 (2007): 32–50, quote on 34. Emphasis in original.
[ix] Genesis 1:28, The New American Bible (New York: Catholic Book
Publishing Company, 1986).
[x] In contemporary animal training, Vicky Hearn has invoked the story in
Genesis as a negotiated respect created between humans and animals in
Adam's Task: Calling Animals by Name. In Companion Species Manifesto, Donna
Haraway invokes Hearn in her own training with dogs, but respectfully
distances herself from the hierarchy implicit in Adam's naming. Instead, she
sees the human–dog relationship as one of co-evolution. Richard Nash
outlines this issue of naming (and includes Carl Linnaeus and Comte de
Buffon) in his essay, "Animal Nomenclature: Facing Other Animals," in
Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture: Representation,
Hybridity, Ethics, ed. Frank Palmeri (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing,
2006), 101–18.
[xi] Quoted in Michael Gaudio, "Surface and Depth: The Art of Early
American Natural History," in Stuffing Birds, Pressing Plants, Shaping
Knowledge: Natural History in North America, 1730–1860, ed. Sue Ann Prince
(Philadelphia: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 2007),
55–73.
[xii] Quoted in Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early
Modern English Culture (New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's Press, 2007), 103–
4.
[xiii] Ibid., 108.
[xiv] Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis (Hoboken, NJ: Bibliobytes; NetLibrary,
1998), 19.
[xv] Hirst, I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, 298.
[xvi] Hirst exhibition program quoted in "Are Modern Animal Mommies
Art?" Animal Mommies,