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[Graeme]

snip

people who visit a Sculpture Park will be intellectuals and therefore stupid

We had a lovely time despite how long we spent critiquing Hirst's "Virgin Mother" and how irritated it made daughter and I. We couldn't afford the cafe. Entry in January was a twofer.
 

There seem to be several different copies of this, each slightly different from the next. I don't like any of them (or Hirst in general) but "irritated" is an intriguing reaction. What made you irritated about it?

Content Warning. Opinion/Religion/Sex

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The irritation came from spending most of the day circling back to discussing his work when we didn't want to. It sat at the back of our minds inviting comparison with all the other sculptures. At first we felt that it was a lame excuse for voyeurism from Hirst - dissecting the pregnant female human form as an object, but later we reflected on the choice of title, "Virgin Mother". Set aside religious sensitivities, the dissected female form is now nothing more than a frame for the artwork. Artwork which is essentially a depiction of an immaculate conception in womb... (otherwise it would simply be called "mother"). We didn't feel Hirst had casually chosen this title, neither had he casually chosen to make this a reference to a fourteen year old girl. My daughter and I get the cultural differences between human history where women and children were property and objects: cultures where wives might have their slaves give birth while sitting on her (the wife's) knees to symbolically make the slave's child their own. Sickening as this feel to our 21c minds, we're not going back to rewrite culture. Hirst isn't doing that either. He is inviting us to draw these conclusions, which we felt we'd stumbled into. Happy with a day out at the park enjoyed the physicality of sculptures in a beautiful setting, we'd bumped into Hirst. We were irritated that we kept thinking about it. Sure there is the provocative masking of bronze as cheap plastic, which you'd need to read in the description to know, but the voyeurism bugged us. Cheap provocation: like the use of the disabled girl, and the half-hearted "hat maketh man" - he isn't saying anything you couldn't read in the grauniad.

We thought "inside out" was a much better piece.


Pentax MX with SMC 50mm f1.4 lens. Ilford XP2 400 ISO B&W film

[Graeme]

Should I be posting these in OT-Gallery? I'm getting muddled between Phototalk, Gallery and OT-Gallery. Sorry everyone.