Still Life

by Melissa Milgrom

  Chinnery and Fuller decided to go in on a lot together. They said they hadn't seen any "serious" people at the preview, and therefore no one would have the same combined diversity of their interests. It buoyed their spirits, but they kept their lot to themselves.

  Then Fuller glared at Hawkins. "Stay off of my list!" he warned her. "Otherwise, I'll break your heart on something else!"

  On the walk up the steep hill to my guesthouse, I realized how tired my eyes were from all I had seen. Mr. Potter's Museum of Curiosities was amazing. But by the end of the auction, the exhibits would be crated up and packed into vans or into shipping containers destined for Britannia tankers bound for other countries. As I made my way up the hill, I felt depressed. I had hoped that someone would rescue the collection at the eleventh hour, but now that seemed improbable. I knew the general public might find the collection distasteful (the dealers were ahead of the curve; taxidermy wouldn't be considered hip and trendy again for another two years), but some smart curator at some big museum had to know what was at stake, which was, in the words of Richard Taylor, deputy librarian at the art college in Dartington who had launched an unsuccessful campaign to save it, "an absolutely unique, irreplaceable collection, and a national treasure."

  Half a million pounds, the Wattses' rumored minimum price for the entire collection, was unremarkable when compared to what a large museum might pay for a single Dutch masterwork, Pat Morris remarked. I wished someone would make a last-ditch offer that Bonhams and the Wattses couldn't refuse. And it had almost happened. Damien Hirst reportedly made a one-million-pound offer for the entire contents. He wanted to merge Potter's with his own sculptures to form his own museum of curiosities. But his offer had reportedly been rejected because he had missed the August deadline for single offers. Hirst published a letter in the Guardian in which he called the sale a tragedy. He owns a house in neighboring Devon and brought his kids to Potter's all the time to watch their faces light up. He said that Potter's had meaning only if it was kept together.

  The next morning, Hawkins and I climb into her van and leave Fowey's old port behind. The auction will start in an hour, barely enough time to make the drive, which winds through quaint towns where no one—except Hawkins, who is in high gear—appears to be in any hurry. She still has to finalize lot prices with her boyfriend, and she's jumpy, fumbling for her cell phone with one hand while keeping the other one on the wheel. I try not to focus on her driving and look out the window instead. Shafts of sunlight stab through a huge white cloud—an incredibly dramatic sky over a breathtaking landscape of granite cliffs and green hills. Hawkins couldn't care less. But now her cell phone is dead, no reception, and she starts to lose it while barreling down the winding road. "I can't believe this!" she fumes. "I've got to readjust my game strategy! I've got to call some people! You've got to make sure you're making the right decision for your clients."

  Things only get worse. Another snag: a car crash in our lane. Thankfully, her cell phone reception is restored. Suddenly stuck in traffic, she feverishly phones her banker to make sure she's liquid should Bonhams call to verify funds. But alas, the bank's computers are down, and Hawkins, in a near panic, convinces the bank manager to vouch for her. Then she clicks off her phone, bellowing with delight, "I love a bank when [its] computers are down!"

  She calls a client to confer on a lot. "Darling, you're a star! You looked brilliant! Bye, gorgeous!" Then she calls her boyfriend. "At least my boyfriend and banker are on call."

  At 9:49, the Jamaica Inn's parking lot is packed. The sun is blinding, bright white, and blue Bonhams flags, hung high on poles, snap in the wind. Hawkins calls her boyfriend one last time: "Lot 66. The scarlet ibis. Eight hundred fifty pounds." Then she clicks off and strides into the tavern. The du Maurier Restaurant, with its timber beams and rustic crockery, is now an auction hall, brimming with three hundred or so people seated in rows of white chairs, as at a wedding, with paddles instead of fans and people instead of kittens.

  Rob Chinnery is pumped up. He grabs Hawkins and says, "I want a word with you!" Pat Morris stands around in a tie that says WISCONSIN PEREGRINE FALCON SOCIETY. Jamaica Inn owner Kevin Moore wipes his wet brow with the back of his hand. His small, dark eyes dart around the room, and he says, "I'm nervous. I had three hours of sleep last night." Meanwhile, seated in the back, is Andy James, vice president of Ye Olde Curiosity Shop (est. 1899) in Seattle. He's after a church made out of corks and two-headed monstrosities (he'll have to outbid Crime Through Time). He relates the information British traders most fear: "Bonhams says there's been more interest internationally than locally."

  Hawkins and Chinnery emerge from their huddle. They stand, strategically, in the middle of the room, directly behind the seated crowd, where they can make eye contact with each other and also be seen by the auctioneers. "We're fired up! You're going to see some action!" Chinnery says to me.

  Standing under a wagon wheel behind a podium flanked by a jungle of potted plants, from which emerge a polar bear and a stiff-faced tiger with a tongue that looks like spoiled meat, is Jon Baddeley. He is wearing a gray sport coat with a red Bonhams lapel pin and a blue tie. The sharp white sun and the black wood interior create a blinding chiaroscuro, obscuring the television simulcast of the first lot: the oil portrait of Walter Potter. Potter's portrait is a profile—as if he can't bear to face the crowd. The wide brushstrokes give him the saturated appearance of someone wearing makeup. He is radiant, with his bushy white muttonchops and thick tuft of silver hair, and this suddenly feels to me like a surreal wake. Finally, after a few tension-filled minutes, the auction is about to start. Baddeley, composed and smiling, grabs the mike and, in a steady voice that doesn't remotely evoke a sideshow barker, greets the crowd with words that will never be spoken here again: "May I welcome you to Mr. Potter's Museum of Curiosities."

  POSTSCRIPT

  In the end, the auction raised £529,800 ($847,600), far less than Hirst's million-pound offer. Hawkins bought The Guinea Pigs' Cricket Match, the scarlet ibis, a skinned rabbit floating in formaldehyde, and several other lots. Fuller snagged Athletic Toads and The Squire and the Parson After Dinner (those gentleman lobsters). And Rob Chinnery paid £23,500 ($53,000) for what turned out to be the most expensive lot sold at the auction: The Death and Burial of Cock Robin. Four years after the sale, the Wattses reportedly threatened Bonhams with a lawsuit for failing to notify them of Hirst's offer, and the Walter Potter Foundation had been established to attempt to reassemble the exhibits.

  7. IN-A-GADDA-DA-VIDA

  I LIKE TO THINK of Damien Hirst as a very rich Walter Potter and his exhibits as a contemporary museum of curiosities—places where people encounter the most shocking and distorted forms of nature: sectioned cows, pickled sharks, glass-encased skeletons, and giant mosaics made entirely of butterfly wings. People are willing to spend millions of dollars on a single Hirst sculpture. In August 2007, he sold a platinum skull studded with 8,601 diamonds for $100 million. Nevertheless, he can create a sense of wonder (or repulsion or fear) in the minds of his viewers only if what he presents is convincing—at least perceived to be genuine. And for that he employs scores of artists, including "the woman behind the dead animals": Emily Mayer.

  A year or so after the Potter's auction, Mayer invited me to the Tate Britain for the opening of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida." The name is from the psychedelic rock band Iron Butterfly's monstrously popular album of 1968. Apparently, Iron Butterfly's lead singer, Doug Ingle, was too stoned to say "Garden of Eden," and that title came out instead. It was a great name for the Hirst show because it, too, was a garbled Eden, one in which the themes of fear, desire, sex, death, and decay collided to form unsettling tensions.

  When I arrived in Guilt Cross, Mayer was in the yard combing a collie that looked as if it had been coated in aspic. She was using a fork to extract silicone from its fur, which was an incredibly tedious process because the fork kept bending out of shape. "I've got to finish the collie and then get on with the dodo skel
eton," she said, dipping the fork into solvent, which smelled like nail polish remover and cut through the cloying smell of silage and manure from the surrounding dairy farms. In addition to the fork, Mayer used a horse-hoof-trimming knife and a gynecological tool she called "a nasty instrument for taking smear samples from women." "I think this is a better use for it," she said indignantly. I groaned. One minute she's crass, and the next she's Mother Nature, looking up at the rooks swooping overhead (as she was now doing) and talking about global warming: "I have an issue with people saying animals are pests. I think the biggest pest on earth is us!"

  On the train to London the next morning, Mayer considered how people would react to the huge slabs of beef she'd molded for the show. "I wonder whether or not they will think it's real. If anyone asks, [Hirst is] going to say they are real and changed every day. How important to the work that is, I don't know." It's very important, in fact. For Hirst, realism (or the illusion of realism) is what differentiates his work (and taxidermy, for that matter) from representational art and gives it the provocative edge he is famous for. His skeletons, sectioned cows, and bisected pigs are genuine, and to see them in a museum (out of context) is intentionally disturbing, exciting, and sad. The floating tiger shark, for instance, was inspired by the movie Jaws, because he wanted to show something "real enough to frighten you."

  The Tate Britain is not very scary. We arrived an hour before the opening. Mayer dressed up looks nothing like Mayer in her grimy work clothes. She has on a green suede bolero jacket from France with a spider brooch on the lapel, mod blue mirrored sunglasses, and trim "city leopard" spotted pants. I followed her to the service entrance, where she handed me a badge that said TATE CONTRACTOR, FLYING BEAR LTD. I put it on, and we glided through security. Attending a Hirst opening as a contractor was nothing like attending it as a curator, art dealer, or critic. I felt like one of his artistic stagehands—the artists and technicians who work behind the scenes, enabling Hirst to put on his show.

  And what a show he puts on. We walked under two rotundas, lit purple and yellow like a chic dance club, and into a hallway where Hirst was sitting with his crew. When he saw Mayer, he shouted, "Drum roll for Em-i-ly!" Everyone pounded on the table as Mayer approached Hirst, who hugged her. Reporters and television cameramen hovered around, waiting for interviews. People slapped Hirst on the back in a congratulatory manner. It felt as if we were backstage at a West End theater production on opening night, with Hirst the leading man. He was wearing brown-tinted sunglasses, a long sweater-coat with dragons embroidered on the back, and taut green leather shoes that looked reptilian. He has spiky salt-and-pepper hair and is half a head shorter than Mayer, who playfully hopped on his lap before she took off to chat with friends.

  "She sounds like a man!" he said, smiling, as I opened my notebook. I laughed out loud. I considered what I knew about this man who had transformed himself from a working-class lad from Leeds into one of England's wealthiest men. He was born in 1965. He didn't know his birth father, and the father who raised him (a car salesman) left when he was twelve. He never forgave the Catholic Church for turning its back on his mother (a former florist with an artistic bent). As a kid, Hirst's childhood bedroom was an animal laboratory where he, like Mayer, bred and raised butterflies and other creatures. He is a Gemini ("I want to fucking share everything with everybody and have a party for the rest of my life") who loves the Beatles song "Two of Us." He has an insatiable fear of death (a love of life, really) and a terrible curiosity about life forms, especially how animals look when taken apart and reassembled. He once said, "I just like rotting." He is an exceptionally brilliant namer, juxtaposing complex titles with simple images. Among the best is I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now (a Ping-Pong ball floating in the air above a spray gun and a glass stand). A known prankster, Hirst once got sued for wagging his penis at a Dublin restaurant. Now this art star was sitting directly across from me. My time was limited. I jumped in: Is taxidermy art?

  "Yeah. I think anything done well is art," he said, and gave an example—cooking, I believe. "If you want to go from point A to point B, it's all about transport. Great transport." He paused and continued. "I just want to create things that look real. I think art is about life. You want things to reflect that—killing things to look at them. For me it's a love of life to explore it on the fringes. It's why kids take toys apart. It's a morbid fascination. It shouldn't be."

  Q: A lot of taxidermists don't consider what they do art.

  D.H.: They spend too much time creating hunting trophies and not enough on what they do. They should be more like Emily. I love her. She's brilliant. She's the only one who can create a sense of fantasy. She's the only one who can do what she does. She is on that level.

  Q: Could you do what you do without Emily?

  D.H.: I think I'd do it differently. I used to use real cadaver animals. If it looks real, that's all that matters.

  Ever since Hirst won Britain's coveted Turner Prize for contemporary art in 1995 for Mother and Child Divided (a cow and a calf sawed into twelve parts and displayed in separate cases), the New York Times says the press has disparaged his work. This show, which also contained work by two of Hirst's former Goldsmith College classmates who rose to fame together in the early 1990s, was no exception. When I got home, I downloaded the reviews: "banal" (New Statesman); "This is not just paradise lost, but paradise never conjured in the first place"(Observer); "You can expect more in fact from the average truck driver" (Guardian); "Its real themes are pompousness, vacuity, big budgets, shot bolts, and the flogging of dead horses" (Financial Times). I wasn't brandishing the knife of a critic, however, but the magnifying glass of a child.

  Yet, even I had trouble imagining that what I encountered in the first gallery was truly Adam and Eve. Lying head to head on two hospital gurneys were Eden's first man and woman—Damien Hirst style—with exposed, hyperrealistic genitals (prepped for surgery) visible through fig-leaf cutouts in blue surgical paper that covered their bodies. Adam and Eve Exposed, a one-liner the critics vilified, honestly didn't move me one way or another. Then the bodies started to breathe. Their chests rose and fell, rose and fell. I gasped, uneasily, then I went over to see something undeniably dead: a six-legged stillborn calf.

  In His Infinite Wisdom reminded me of a Walter Potter freak—the conjoined pickled swine, actually—only supersized and strangely beautiful. Pristine and fleecy white with large black spots, it languidly floated in a glass tank as if in a cloud. The critics loved this unaltered (or so it seemed) piece for its power and simplicity. I figured the calf had been simply dropped into formaldehyde, but when I told Mayer that, she laughed. "Well, actually, quite a lot was done to that," she said, explaining how it had been frozen for fifteen years before she had defrosted and rehydrated it, then shampooed and fluffed it up. I wondered why it was considered art and not natural history. If the calf were displayed in South Kensington at the Natural History Museum, would it then become science?

  Hirst's first formaldehyde piece, Isolated Elements Swimming in the Same Direction for the Purpose of Understanding (1991)—thirty-eight Plexiglas boxes, each one containing a fish—looked like science masquerading as art, a direct attempt to blur those boundaries. Similarly, the floating shark in The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) was Hirst's rendition of a "zoo that worked." "Because I hate the zoo, and I just thought it would be great to do a zoo of dead animals, instead of having living animals pacing about in misery, I thought that's what a natural history museum is really," he once said in a catalog. Even the sectioned cows evoked pathos in Hirst's mind: "I never really thought of them as violent. I always thought of them as sad. There is a kind of tragedy with all those pieces. I always did them where their feet don't touch the floor. They are floating things."

  Mayer and I circled the exhibit. Everyone from Hirst's inner circle was here: Frank Dunphy, his business manager and accountant; Rungway K
ingdon, the tall bearded Mauritian who owns Pangolin, the foundry that casts Hirst's huge bronzes; his assistants and independent contractors. At any given time, Hirst employs more than forty artists and technicians to do his behind-the-scenes work. Many of them were here in this room. They cast the resin pills for the stainless steel medicine cabinets (sixteen thousand pills in one piece), design the graphics for the pharmaceutical logos, and saw the sheep. People are often surprised to learn that Hirst doesn't paint a single spot on his signature spot paintings. Yet his name is on them all, just as it would be, Mayer explains dismissively, if he were Frank Lloyd Wright and she were Fred the bricklayer.

  We chatted with the "butterfly ladies," the women who make his floor-to-ceiling mosaics of intricately patterned butterfly wings. Intense and radiant, these giant panels evoke a cathedral's stained-glass windows—macro-versions of Potter's pinned butterflies, only incomparably powerful. I asked the women if, after a year or so of pulling wings off them, they still enjoyed butterflies. "Sadly, no—not that much," Rose, a bubbly blonde, replied.

  While Hirst's butterfly paintings move people with their beauty, his fly paintings (giant canvases coated with gobs of dead flies that resemble gooey raisins) fill them with dread. In the next gallery, Will Sheer, the artist who made Hirst's fly painting Night Falls Fast, stood in front of the huge black monochrome. A Hirst staple, the fly paintings represent a plague of sorts—Eden falls to desire.