Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living

Though this looks like an exhibit in a natural history museum, Hirst’s subject comes straight from art history.

Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991

[0:00] [music]

Dr. Beth Harris: [0:06] We’re looking at one of my favorite works of art from the last 30 or 40 years. This is Damien Hirst. And I’ll admit that one of my favorite aspects of this work is its title.

Sal Khan: [0:17] I feel like just those words could be a work of art. I’m not even looking at the shark. The idea of “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.” There’s different ways to parse that, actually. It’s either wordplay or deep, and I haven’t figured that out yet.

Dr. Harris: [0:31] It strikes me as this great truth. The impossibility of really coming to terms with death as someone who’s living. In many ways, the history of art is a coming to terms with mortality, of transcending the physical body, of the afterlife. Art, through history, has dealt with big questions. This is a work of art taking on those big questions.

Sal: [0:56] I agree with you about the title. That title, I’m going to think about it all day. That’s why we’re so afraid of death, because we just can’t process it. But what we’re looking at is, I’m assuming, a non-living shark, looks like a very large shark, in a tank. But, what am I looking at, actually?

Dr. Harris: [1:12] It’s a real shark that was caught and killed and suspended in a tank of formaldehyde.

Sal: [1:19] It’s stationary, although it looks like it’s moving.

Dr. Harris: [1:20] It is stationary and it’s in a beautiful tank, something that the artist is sort of framing the shark in for us to see it.

Sal: [1:29] Just going back to both the title and it being a work of art, and I’m starting to appreciate — because, you know, you could put this in a natural history museum, “this is a shark, this is what a shark looks like, study it” — it’s like a stuffed bison or woolly mammoth or something.

[1:43] The title, combined with this, makes me think. There’s some obvious things here. It’s dead. I can interpret it. I just feel like I’d be making up stuff, though.

Dr. Harris: [1:54] I think that’s part of the idea. When artists make things in the 20th and the 21st century, they’re more open to interpretation than art in the Renaissance. We’re looking at art which is meant to be open to interpretation. It’s not just what the artist said it meant, but we’re allowed to bring our own ideas and associations to it, to fill out its meaning, to complete it.

[2:18] In fact, Duchamp said that a work of art is completed by the viewer. So let’s talk about our associations with it.

Sal: [2:25] Yes, we’re almost challenged that it’s physically impossible to comprehend death in the mind of the living, I believe I’m living. Based on the title, I’m being told that I can’t comprehend death and I’m being faced with death right there, I’m being faced with a very big version of death, on kind of multiple dimensions. The shark is dead, although it looks like it’s swimming, but it’s also something that could kill me. [laughs]

[2:49] This is post the movie “Jaws.” There’s few animals that occur to humans as something scary more than a big shark.

Dr. Harris: [2:58] When you stand in front of this, it’s scary to look at.

Sal: [3:01] It’s like, “Oh my God, I’m very close to something that could kill me.” I guess your brain keeps going back and forth, “Am I really processing death here, or am I fearful of this thing that I can’t process?” and that’s what I’m afraid of.

[3:13] Why couldn’t he have put a tiger? Maybe he could’ve, he just chose to use a shark. Or a shark is more convincing or it’s just different.

Dr. Zucker: [3:21] He does use other animals. There’s this famous series where he slices sheep lengthwise and puts them in tanks. This is not the original shark. In other words, this sculpture now has a second shark because the first one dissolved despite the formaldehyde, it decayed.

[3:38] The formaldehyde, of course, is trying to maintain the intactness of the shark and perhaps even its viciousness and this notion of its livingness, but we fail. This still dissolves. This still in a sense, even the dead shark.

Sal: [3:52] That wasn’t by design, though. He intended this to be a permanent…

Dr. Zucker: [3:55] I think he is struggling to keep this shark intact. That’s exactly right, but we don’t have the means to do that.

Dr. Harris: [4:02] But who isn’t struggling to keep themselves intact?

Sal: [4:06] Here I’m feeling that there’s a…I guess I haven’t completely bought this layer of interpretation, because this feels like a completely inadvertent side effect of how…the fact that he put a shark in formaldehyde to me implies that he was hoping that this would be around for a long time.

[4:22] His design didn’t hold up to time. It’s falling apart, but that wasn’t the artist’s intention.

Dr. Zucker: [4:29] Well, it’s interesting. By the time we get to the late 20th century, artists are well-versed in this idea of the impermanence of art. Beth said a minute ago that art for its entire history has tried to transcend human death.

[4:41] In fact, one of the definitions, one of the philosophical definitions of what a work of art is, is something that outlives us. That is transgenerational. But here’s something that is not paint. Here’s something that’s not marble. Here’s something that is flesh like we are. And yet there is this vain attempt to have it outlive us and it doesn’t.

Dr. Harris: [5:01] I think he knew, yeah.

Sal: [5:03] So it wasn’t just a design flaw. He stuck this in amber or something.

Dr. Zucker: [5:06] There’s too much art that has changed over time for him not to know, he’s too sophisticated.

Sal: [5:11] To know that this would’ve been kind of a…

Beth: [5:13] The ancient Egyptians mummified bodies. There’s a whole history of human beings trying to stop time. We all know that we can use our best chemicals, we can do plastic surgery, we can do all sorts of things. Nothing is going to stop the inevitability of…

[5:31] [crosstalk]

Sal: [5:31] Yeah. I mean he could have stuck it in amber or something, and been that much more preserved.

Dr. Harris: [5:35] Could have been even slower.

Sal: [5:37] It would have been, yes.

Dr. Zucker: [5:37] Or he could have done something much more traditional, which is he could have represented a shark and made it more permanent in that way.

Sal: [5:44] Right.

Dr. Zucker: [5:45] But by choosing the thing itself, he created the impossibility of its own preservation.

Sal: [5:51] Yeah, my brain just keeps going back and forth. Once again, the title by itself is all you need.

Dr. Zucker: [5:56] So you have that whole conceptual dimension, but then you have this absolutely physical dimension, and you have this clash between that physical and that poetic. It’s in that contradiction, it’s in that confrontation, that I think the art really exists.

Dr. Harris: [6:11] Yeah, I don’t think it’s just in the title. The title is lovely and really speaks to me, I admit it. But the title together with the sculpture is a really complicated experience.

Sal: [6:22] I feel like there should almost be a new type of museum called a Philosophy Museum. Especially if you look at a classical art museum. It is about the history and the conversation that people are having, but it is a lot about aesthetics. Maybe, actually, modern art should be called philosophical art or a museum of philosophy, because it really is —

[6:45] Even the word museum, I feel, is wrong. Because museum seems to be, “Let’s preserve something that someone else has created.” While it seems like a lot of this modern art is about, “Put the philosophy in your face right now without an answer.” I don’t know whether I’m being hoodwinked or not.

Dr. Zucker: [7:01] I think that question about always being a little bit worried, about this being a grand joke in some way, is always there. It’s something that gets given voice quite a bit, in part because in art now, almost nothing is off-limits. And artists find ways of asking profound questions about things that can be very mundane or seem overtly silly but can actually be…

Sal: [7:27] Or intentionally shocking.

Dr. Zucker: [7:28] Absolutely. I think, in some ways, the art world asks for that cynicism. But on the other hand, that doesn’t mean that profound ideas aren’t being asked.

[7:36] [music]

Cite this page as: Sal Khan, Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, "Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living," in Smarthistory, December 8, 2015, accessed November 10, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/damien-hirst-the-physical-impossibility-of-death-in-the-mind-of-someone-living/.