Still Life

by Melissa Milgrom

  "Will made this," boasted Sheer's girlfriend.

  "We hatch them and kill them with fly spray. They die and we scoop them up, and they get mixed up with resin and stuck on the work. We paint them into place. We do it by the liter. There must be two hundred liters [of flies] in each piece," he explained.

  "They stink!" said the girlfriend.

  "I got used to the smell. They smell like moldy cheese," said Sheer.

  Finally, Mayer and I headed over to The Pursuit of Oblivion, a crucifixion in a butcher shop. Only this butcher shop was in a gigantic fish tank filled with provocative props. What was being crucified was Mayer's sides of beef, which hang from meat hooks above a butcher block. The molded slabs with yellow marbling looked exactly like what you'd see in a butcher shop before the meat is cut into steaks. The butcher block did not; on it was a human skull, knives, a nautilus, and a frying pan filled with brains. An umbrella and strings of sausage dangled from above, swaying in the clear water of the fish tank like plankton.

  The sculpture was Hirst's homage to a Francis Bacon painting called 1946. Bacon, the Irish-born Parisian exile, who died in 1992, has been Hirst's hero since he was sixteen, and I could see why. Bacon was captivated by slaughterhouses as "the absolute place of death": meat suspended as if crucified; meat with contorted mouths screaming in agony (he also painted monsters, bloody carcasses, crucifixions, and decomposing heads—consider Hirst without bathos or tropical fish). Bacon's shock tactics were meant to evoke the horrors of human existence. He painted 1946 at the end of World War II. As Bacon once famously said, "Well of course we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher's shop I always think it's surprising that I wasn't there instead." Hirst is more minimal: "Animals become meat. That's abstract."

  I stared at the swaying meat. Tropical fish darted around a skinned cow head. British art critics called the piece chaotic and heavy-handed. The viewers that night were riveted, though not disturbed or even perplexed. Still, they were not without curiosity. Mostly they wanted to know if the meat was real. Even Hirst's dealer, Jay Jopling, owner of London's White Cube gallery—someone who knows Hirst's sleight of hand—gazed into the tank, mystified. "You just would never, never, never know," he said.

  "That's fabulous! Amazing!" people cried.

  The tank gargled. An eel twined around a fractured human skull, evoking a medieval apothecary. "That's a small shark, I believe," said a spiffy woman.

  Another person said, "I don't know how it doesn't poison the water. All the bits and pieces. The water's completely clean. I think it's a model. Is that real meat? It might have algae or something?"

  The week before, when Mayer delivered the piece, the museum staff thought it was a kitchen delivery. A scuba diver had to dive in and arrange the props. The gallery floors (directly above the Tate's library) had to be reinforced to support the weight of the massive glass tanks. "The last time I saw it, the water was murky, and the [cow] head was floating up to the top," Mayer said, smiling with pride.

  I went back to see it a second time. A young man with sideburns and closely cropped hair stood inches from the glass. He admired the sculpture. He admired the beef. The man was Martin Gilder, and he knew the cut intimately, knew it better than an art critic. Gilder happens to be the owner of Martin's Meats, a large meat wholesaler and slaughterhouse and farm, which supplies the carcasses from which Mayer makes her replicas. If anyone here could discern art from life, it was Gilder the butcher. I asked him to critique it.

  He shook his head. He flashed a big smile and examined it with the trained eyes of a master craftsman. Was it believable? No, he said, the color was off. But just slightly. "Needs to be redder. Should look wetter—even in water it looks dry." He laughed. "It's above average. It's what you call a very high confirmation; it's almost double muscle. It's graded a 'u-plus-one'—one is fat content. You could eat it, but it would need more fat to taste good."

  He went on, "If you went back thirty or forty years, this wouldn't be shocking, because even a small village had a butcher shop and an abattoir. People are so far removed from how meat comes to your table. They see it beautifully packaged in supermarkets and don't associate it with animals anymore. What gives it away is the way it is hanging—all carcasses hang the other way around, because it's the way the meat pulls down from the hind legs and becomes more tender. Also, the neck would be much darker and redder."

  Before Hirst's crew headed to a nearby pub, Mayer looked at the beef one last time: "I'm a little scrutinizing but happy. I love the way the fish are interacting with it." She bought the exhibition catalog. Hirst signed it:

  For Emily.

  Keep it real.

  XXX

  Damien Hirst

  It was great to attend the opening with Mayer and to meet Hirst. But I still hadn't seen Mayer work. Another year went by. Then one day, the phone rang. It was Mayer. Her two terriers, Alice and Gus, had been mysteriously poisoned and died. (No: she buries them. Always.) She was deeply disturbed by this and also very sad. Then she said, "I have another cow here at the moment that I'm working on. And two cow heads that have to be cast as well." She invited me to watch her work. She sent me a link to help me find a cheap flight.

  She was 372^ hours into the cow when I showed up in Guilt Cross. It was the week before Christmas. Half-finished Hirst projects lay everywhere: resin blood puddles, a fish skeleton in a vise, and two cow heads in the boiler room. But the first thing I saw when I stepped inside the workshop was a seven-foot-long black-and-white Holstein suspended from an I-beam. Its head drooped down as if it had been hanged. Its tongue stuck out comically from lips that were soft and black and fringed with stray whiskers. The cow looked dead—freshly dead—which it was supposed to be. Its glossy legs were artificially bent at the knees as if it were genuflecting or begging for mercy. Its chest cavity was split open. You could see its guts, its blood-red rib cage, its glistening milky yellow fat. It was horrific. It was beautiful. It was a crucified cow.

  "How the hell did you make this?" I asked, unable to move for several seconds as I gazed at the most stunning, and the most terrifying, piece of art I have ever seen. It was the most alive dead replica imaginable, which of course sounds silly.

  "You can see inside the cow—all the ribs and everything. That's all fake," she said. "You want to believe it's a cow in there and not just a black hollow cavity." Her tone was admonishing, as if I should know what the fake innards of a fake dead cow were supposed to look like. She lit a roll-up and thoughtfully inhaled. I stared transfixed.

  Mayer had no idea what the client intended to do with the cow once it was finished, and I didn't pry, because I found it far more disturbing here in Mayer's studio than it would ever be anywhere else, especially a gallery or a museum where glass panes might separate it from me. Glass panes are barriers, which say in effect, "This is staged." Glass panes anchor a piece (and us) to the museum, a cultural authority, legitimizing it. Moreover, the glass separates us from death; it's a distancing element, providing safety, comfort, and, perhaps more important, a sense that someone is in charge of this death, someone with a respectable title that is not "taxidermist," such as "conservator" or "curator" or "philanthropist" or "scientist." But in here, in Mayer's workhouse studio, in this dark, wintry, isolated Norfolk farm country, the cow was eerie and surreal. There was no glass partition separating me from it, and I shivered with excitement and fear.

  It was her fifth erosion-molded cow and her best. It is incredibly difficult to erosion mold a cow. Every scrap of anatomy must be preplanned. If she miscalculates, say, the catalyst times for the resin, the cow might cure improperly, and the fur is irreplaceable. The attention to detail is staggering. You can look up its nostrils and see bumps and hair. You can peer into its mouth at its pink-and-gray-ribbed pallet. Its big brown eyes are bloodshot near the irises; its fur-fringed ears are soft and translucent; its teats and asshole are embarrassingly convincing. All of that has to be worked out before the cow is slaughtered.
r />   "Everything is fake except the hair, obviously. It's essentially a fake cow with real hair," Mayer explained.

  The hooves?

  "The hooves were cast with everything else. There's pink inside so you have that glow and depth and it looks like a living thing rather than a lump of solidness."

  The teeth?

  "I just cast the teeth in when I cast the whole cow. You can see the negative in the mold in the boiler room."

  The eyes?

  "They need to look fresh like it just died. I like them a little more glazed over."

  Mayer still had to reattach the cow's head, fine-tune its face, and hide the seams. She also had to make fake intestines, because the work order called for guts to spill out of its body. Color photocopies of purple and yellow cow intestines lay all over the studio; she'd use them as a guide—like a high-tech paint-by-number—only instead of paint, Mayer would use a mixture of resin and flock (wool fibers that give it texture). She compared the process to painting on glass.

  For this job, however, color photocopies alone wouldn't do. Mayer would need fresh reference, so she had the slaughterhouse open up a cow and photograph its hot intestines spilling out onto its hooves. The intestines were then frozen and delivered to her studio. Now she booted up her laptop and clicked on a file name, calling up the slit-open cow spilling guts. Then she clicked on another file (I'll spare you). She took a drag on her cigarette; the smell of smoke kept me from throwing up.

  "Obviously, we didn't want it sitting on its ass, because that would look totally stupid!" she said with a snarl, clicking JPEG file after JPEG file. No, it was to be bent at the knees. But cows' knees don't bend ("Obviously!") unless you cut the tendons. With typical Mayer relish, she showed me where she cut them. "I just put a scalpel ... I just cut them from the insides just like a tiny old nick." The tongue had already been sticking out, but "I persuaded it a bit more."

  Here's how Mayer cast the cow's body. Once the frozen cow was posed and coated in silicone inside and out (she intubated it and poured rubber down its throat), she bolted a thermoplastic support jacket with ribs over the outside of the body to hold the cow in place while the flesh rotted and the rubber cured. Once it had uniformly decomposed, Mayer pried off the jacket, peeled off the silicone, and implanted all the precast anatomy.

  "You can do things most women never would," I said.

  "I can do things most men can't do!" she said with a loud laugh.

  While I was there, she worked for hours and hours reattaching the head, never pausing, not even for food. (Luckily, I found a pillowcase full of dried apple slices hanging on her husband's door and snuck upstairs periodically to eat.) By day three, I started to fidget and ask questions. "You could be doing this yourself in galleries and making quite a splash," I said, crunching numbers in my mind.

  "Well, I couldn't, because I don't think of the ideas, do I? And if I went and showed this as a piece of art in a different context or whatever, I'd be like stealing, wouldn't I? I can't do that. I wouldn't want to anyway."

  As it happens, the Uphall Dairy, a big commercial milk supplier, is right across the road from the workhouse. The next afternoon, Mayer suggests we go there to look at cows. She wants to observe cow noses, eyes, tongues, and topknots in order to perfect her facsimiles.

  A ceiling of gray clouds hovers over us as we walk over to the huge milking sheds. They smell like manure and wet hay. "It reminds me of my childhood in the country," Mayer says. She is wearing a blue fleece jacket, black leather clogs, and torn jeans splotched with paint. When we pass the birthing field, Mayer spots a stillborn calf lying on the muddy ground. She stops to examine it with the unsentimental eyes of a scientist or a veterinarian. The industrial sheds, covered by corrugated cement-composite roofs, contain rows and rows of Holsteins. "Metal would be too noisy for them, wouldn't it?" she admonishes. I, her reluctant apprentice, nod sheepishly.

  We walk along the side of a shed. Mayer narrates what she is seeing; she is teaching me how to look at cows. They are postcard perfect, black with wonderful white spots, tagged and numbered (yellow clips in their ears), wearing electric bracelets that monitor their milk production. They poke their bony heads through the fence, grazing, staring up at us with huge brown eyes. "They have great faces," she says excitedly. "When you start looking at them, each one is different. That one has bluish eyes. They've got different topknots—curly, straight. That one's kind of worn-out, really." Then she does a very un-Mayer-like thing. She gets all gushy, talking to the cows as if they were children. She grabs some hay and waves it under their pink and black nostrils, trying to get one to stick out its tongue for a photo. "I want to see your tongue, baby! Taste some hay!" she croons.

  "That one's got a really short face compared to that one, which is long and broad," she says. I check out their faces. To me, they look alike, but I'd never say that to Mayer. So I look for variations: 00676's nose is more well-defined than 00758's, and 500211 has amazing wrinkles above its eyes. 00749 (mostly black) has a blue tongue. "That one has an orange nose, and that one's really pink. And that one is concave between the eyes," she says.

  She gives a cow an "Eskimo kiss," rubbing noses with it. The cow's bony head is three times as big as hers is. "It's called Ray! Look! Look at the pink on that nose [00636] versus the orangy pink on that one [60075]! They can lick right up their nostrils. Look!" As if on cue, 60075 sticks its tongue up its nostril. Mayer bursts out laughing.

  She leads me farther along the side of the shed. "Look how fat that gray one's nose is. It's like a boxer. It's quite narrow behind the nose, and the nose is broad, like it walked into a wall." Occasionally, she turns back to make sure I've noticed everything—all the nuances that enable her to excel at her job. "That one has a face like Alice [her late terrier]: she has a funny undershot jaw—the lower jaw is too far forward. Look at the shape of their bodies. I love cows! Look at how bony that one is! It's almost like a skeleton with the skin just hanging over it."

  She pets the bony one's nose with the back of her hand. "They're friendly but don't like to be touched too much. The more you look at them, the more you can see. Some are really pretty, and some are quite brutish-looking. She's quite cute.

  "I just want it to stick its tongue out for me, and it's gotten all shy," she says. The cow sticks its tongue up its nostril. Mayer snaps a photo. "You've got a ridiculously pink nose, don't you?" she gushes, extending her hand to another grazer. "Somebody lick me!"

  000021 is an archetype: the perfect specimen, almost a cliché. "That's a beauty," Mayer says, eyeing me to make sure I've noticed all the variations—variations taxidermists live for and I am only now just beginning to perceive. "There! Are you seeing the differences now?"

  8. KEN AND THE IRISH ELK

  WITH ITS OIL-RICH PRAIRIES, cattle ranches, and mechanical bulls, Alberta, Canada, is often compared to Texas, only it is much, much colder. In the 1960s and 1970s, Edmonton, the province's capital, was like Houston: a boom-and-bust town founded on light oil, which was discovered just south of the city in 1947. Then, in the 1980s, the big petroleum companies moved their headquarters to Calgary, much to the dismay of Edmontonians, who also never got over losing their area code to Calgary or losing the distinction of having the world's largest shopping mall to Minneapolis. Nonetheless, in spite of what some locals call its huge inferiority complex, Edmonton doggedly clings to its nickname: "City of Champions."

  Of all the champions ever to have come from Edmonton, none is more famous than hockey star Wayne Gretzky. Gretzky won four Stanley Cups with the Edmonton Oilers and is considered the greatest hockey player ever. He retired in 1999, the same year, as it happens, that Ken Walker took his first Best of Show with his timber wolves. Other taxidermists accused him of coming out of nowhere. "Out of nowhere?" he exclaims. "I was a commercial taxidermist for fifteen years before I competed, and people would say to me, 'You came out of nowhere!' If you take a real good commercial taxidermist and open up his mind he's gonna win."

 
Ken was telling me this as we pulled out of Edmonton International Airport. We were in his pickup, a Toyota Velocity, driving northwest to his acreage in Alberta Beach. The highway cut through snow-covered prairies; the dim sun hung low in the sky; the gusty air was crisp and filled with swirling snow. "This is what I missed so much in DC," he said, his alert hunter's eyes scanning from side to side.

  It was a balmy ten degrees that day in February 2005—not icy enough to plug your radiator into one of those parking lot heat boxes that keep Edmontonians' engines from freezing. I shivered in a down parka and heavy snow boots and slid the .410 automatic shotgun, which I had been sitting on, to the edge of my seat. A box of empty .270 casings lay on the armrest between us. Birds seem to recognize the roar of his engine and fly off the moment he approaches. Even the local animal rights activist keeps his distance. "He's kind of creepy," Ken said.

  Ken hadn't trimmed his beard or cut his hair in weeks and superstitiously vowed not to until the World Taxidermy Championships in two months. His wife, Colette, called him "Grizzly Adams," and it wasn't an exaggeration. If he wasn't wearing a camouflage baseball cap that said north country taxidermy and a shirt emblazoned with the Smithsonian logo, I might not have known it was Ken—until he started to ramble in that dazzling Ken-like way. I didn't believe everything he said (Theodore Roosevelt shot and had someone preserve a porter on safari?), but I loved his unbridled enthusiasm, how he glided from topic to topic, equally excited about everything that entered his mind. First he mimicked Dr. Ruth, then, without pausing, he went on and on about a mammoth dug up recently in Japan. "I want to be the guy who puts the thing together!" he exclaimed.

  A stand of frost-covered conifers caught his eye. "Killed my first moose with a bow and arrow right here in these trees," he said. "My only moose with a bow and arrow!"