New Left Review I/216, March-April 1996

Julian Stallabrass

In and Out of Love Damien Hirst

On weekends at the Tate Gallery, long queues of pretty young, pretty cool people would form before two tall glass cases arranged to make a narrow corridor. Each case contained one half of a cow which had been split lengthways from nose to tail, and the queue was for the privilege of walking between them to closely examine the innards. This, and a calf similarly treated, which formed the work Mother and Child, Divided, were Damien Hirst’s contribution to the 1995 Turner Prize exhibition—as it had been to the Venice Biennale two years earlier. If a point of the work was to make people behave in this way, then it would have been a good joke; but there are reasons to think that it was rather more earnest than this. [1]

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