Understanding Art: Hirst’s Shark
“The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”, is quite a winding title for a work of art. Isn’t the name itself quite daunting to take in, let alone the dissection and intricacies of the artwork? Well the artwork itself is quite intimidating, but not because it is elaborate, intricate or complex.
For something that is considered to serve not only as the epitome of Britart (a modern British conceptual artistic movement of the 80s and 90s) but also a piece, that came to characterize British art abroad in the 90s. The $8–12 million (speculated sale price in 2004) visual art piece consisted of a 14-foot dead Tiger Shark suspended in a 5% formaldehyde aqueous solution enclosed in a roughly 7-foot by 17-foot by 7-foot thick steel-framed glass tank. For something specified as “Tiger shark, glass, steel, 5% formaldehyde solution, 213 × 518 × 213 cm.” instead of “Oil on Canvas 44x39”, TPIDMSL is definitely not your typical art piece, not even by the erstwhile “contemporary” art standards.
But there has to be something in it, it can’t just be a shark suspended in a solution in a simplistic vitrine, right? Maybe the tank has some hidden details or the shark’s body has been subtly processed or toned or recoloured to convey some abstract sentiment or tap into one’s passive subconscious, isn’t it? No. It is what it is. A Shark in a Preservative chemical solution in a large, rectilinear steel-glass cabinet. That’s it. That’s all. Moreover, the original tiger shark was substituted (read replaced) by a new specimen in 2006 owing to its deterioration. Thus the work violates two of the typecast “must-be” notions of art that exist in the minds of most people — irreproducibility and irreplaceability. In fact, Hirst admitted that being a conceptualist, the intent conveyed mattered more to him than the physical identity, wholeness, and selfhood of the artwork itself. Perhaps, it all boils down to the Ship of Theseus argument — How much of an art can you physically take away or trade before it stops being itself. Hirst’s response to those who said that anyone could have done this artwork was, “But you didn’t, did you?”. Hirst would go on to make similar pieces, changing the nature and dimensions of the container, and for the other having a guppy fish in place of the shark.
Context is important in art. Great art is either socially relevant to the time it was conceived or created in or is novel or both. Besides novelty and relevance, the identity, background, and credentials of the artist, as well as their intent and self-identification, constitute the attributes of an artwork. The Shark conveyed the abstract sentiment that Hirst wanted his audiences to mull upon. Hirst had the choice of exhibiting whatever he wanted (a patron sponsored him, handing him his money, and asking him to make whatever he felt like), and he chose to allot the pedestal of a coveted commission to it. This allocation in itself constituted an artistic choice. Hirst, being a renowned artist was one of the best persons to make that choice at that time and place. He deemed the conveyance and evocation of a particular emotion more important than anything else.
Sharks are mean machines (not to make a sweeping statement, but they’re). They don’t even shut their eyes, tuck in a cozy spot, and doze off. When sharks rest or sleep, their eyes stay open as they lack eyelids, and their pupils incessantly monitor motions around them. Moreover, unlike other fish, many (not all) sharks need to constantly keep moving in order to maintain a constant flow of water over their gills. If this flux ceases, so will the oxygen intake, and the shark would asphyxiate and die. When you behold a shark, regardless of whatever it is thinking or intending, Hirst’s self-explanatory lengthy title appears promptly justified. Just one intent glance at a shark and you know it, it appears to you (and this might very well include anthropic biases of appearance perception) that the thing is in a perpetual quest — a continual seeking to fulfill its singular urge. When a dead shark is found, it often appears as if even in the moments just preceding its natural death, it never dawned upon it that it could die. The shark never seems to conceive, comprehend, or realise the termination of its consciousness. Sharks are apex predators, situated at the top of the food chain. Being preyed upon is incomprehensible to them. A mind that cannot and does not imagine the cessation of its own existence, that was perhaps the point the artist wanted to drive home. A being so wholly preoccupied with a blind, basal urge to secure its prey to feed itself that it is rendered incapable of realising its mortality, even in the very moment of its death, its aggression is frozen, unflinched. The shark’s consistent aggression, its intimidating composure, its unrelenting, ruthless disposition persists in death, as in life. The dead shark didn’t know it was dying, it’s as if someone just hit the button on the stopwatch for the shark while the world moved on. When one looks at the artwork, one can’t help but experience the pang of apprehension in one corner of their mind, that the button might be hit again. The viewer just can’t shrug off the feeling that whoever paused the shark’s stopwatch shall resume it, and the shark would be live and torpedoing again as if for it, nothing had changed in the interim; Nothing had transpired in that duration.
TPIDMSL is very much an active piece of work for the appropriate beholder. The dichotomy, superposition, coexistence, and tantalising simultaneity of life and death, that Hirst would explore in a number of his future pieces are palpable even to the most mundane, disinterested, and detached of viewers.
The iconic work brings one face-to-face with something that could end their lives — a confrontation of a dead potential cause of death that tantalisingly looks very much lively.
