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Lot Essay
Created in 1995—the year of the artist’s victorious Turner Prize entry—Ashtray Head/Fallen Empire is an arresting and unmistakable large-scale sculpture by Damien Hirst. A gigantic ashtray, eight feet across and formed of white fibreglass, holds the head of a cow. Dark red blood, studded with flies, pools out over the pristine surface. In a body of work that confronts mortality head-on, both cow and ashtray have been central motifs for Hirst: from the iconic system of cow’s head, flies and Insect-O-Cutor in A Thousand Years (1990) and the bisected cow and calf of Mother and Child, Divided (1993)—a key part of his Turner Prize entry—to the eight-foot ashtray sculptures Horror at Home (1995) and Party Time (1995), which contain the remains of thousands of cigarettes smoked at the Groucho Club, his favourite Soho haunt. The present work uniquely combines these two emblems, creating a monumental vanitas of surreal and striking impact. It was acquired directly from the artist shortly after it was made, and has remained in the same private collection since.
Hirst’s works of the 1990s are among the most recognisable in modern art. They defined the era of the Young British Artists, sparking controversy and acclaim in equal measure, and have lost none of their unnerving power today. Their provocation lies partly in their unorthodox components, which, in Duchampian mode, overspill the margins between art and life. The artist has spoken of ‘always wanting things to be real and wanting people to feel like they were being presented with their own lives … I wanted people to think, “That shouldn’t be in an art gallery”, as well as questioning why they are in an art gallery’ (D. Hirst, quoted in ‘Like People, Life Flies: Damien Hirst interviewed by Mirta d’Argenzio’, in Damien Hirst: The Agony and The Ecstasy: Selected Works from 1989-2004, exh. cat. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples 2004, p. 118). Beyond their initial shock value, however, his sculptures are made potent by an extraordinary formal rigour. In Ashtray Head/Fallen Empire, the ashtray’s whiteness—its seamless finish worthy of the Minimalist structures of Sol Lewitt or Donald Judd—heightens the visceral presence of the head within. As with the sterile, hard-edged vitrines of A Thousand Years and Hirst’s ‘Natural History’ formaldehyde works, this vivid contrast speaks to a hopeless human impulse to contain, deny or sanitise the idea of death. The body erupts violently and creatively from amid these stark, ordered frameworks, like the fleshy convulsions of a Francis Bacon painting: in the present work, the slick of blood is like paint splashed on a virgin canvas.
Cows, Hirst has observed, ‘are the most slaughtered animals ever ... I see them as death objects’ (D. Hirst, quoted in S. Morgan, ‘An Interview with Damien Hirst’, in No Sense of Absolute Corruption, exh. cat. Gagosian Gallery, New York 1996, p. 18). His interest in smoking is similarly symbolic. Like candles in a memento mori still life, cigarettes are markers of the passage of time, their burning down analogous to the slow extinguishing of a human lifespan. Hirst, however, finds a paradoxical splendour in the agency of smoking. ‘I went to some posh person’s house and they had a tiny little fucking ashtray, it was about two inches by one inch’, he said in 1995. ‘And they had a beautiful house. It’s like they were trying to reduce the horror to such a point. You could only fit about three cigarette butts in it, then they’d empty it … The whole thing in life is you don’t know when you’re going to die. It makes everything not make sense, there’s this unknown factor. Whereas if you suddenly go, “OK, I choose to die now”, you take the matter into your own hands. So smoking is the perfect way to commit suicide without actually dying’ (D. Hirst, quoted in A. Graham-Dixon, ‘In the Picture: Horror at Home, by Damien Hirst’, The Sunday Telegraph, 31 December 2000). The present work seems to visualise this contradiction, and in its monumental scale becomes a riveting piece of theatre. Rather than shrinking from mortality, Hirst invites the viewer to confront it as part of life: his ashtray is an arena large enough to dive into, like a bullring or colosseum, with death a stubbed-out offering at its centre.
Hirst’s works of the 1990s are among the most recognisable in modern art. They defined the era of the Young British Artists, sparking controversy and acclaim in equal measure, and have lost none of their unnerving power today. Their provocation lies partly in their unorthodox components, which, in Duchampian mode, overspill the margins between art and life. The artist has spoken of ‘always wanting things to be real and wanting people to feel like they were being presented with their own lives … I wanted people to think, “That shouldn’t be in an art gallery”, as well as questioning why they are in an art gallery’ (D. Hirst, quoted in ‘Like People, Life Flies: Damien Hirst interviewed by Mirta d’Argenzio’, in Damien Hirst: The Agony and The Ecstasy: Selected Works from 1989-2004, exh. cat. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples 2004, p. 118). Beyond their initial shock value, however, his sculptures are made potent by an extraordinary formal rigour. In Ashtray Head/Fallen Empire, the ashtray’s whiteness—its seamless finish worthy of the Minimalist structures of Sol Lewitt or Donald Judd—heightens the visceral presence of the head within. As with the sterile, hard-edged vitrines of A Thousand Years and Hirst’s ‘Natural History’ formaldehyde works, this vivid contrast speaks to a hopeless human impulse to contain, deny or sanitise the idea of death. The body erupts violently and creatively from amid these stark, ordered frameworks, like the fleshy convulsions of a Francis Bacon painting: in the present work, the slick of blood is like paint splashed on a virgin canvas.
Cows, Hirst has observed, ‘are the most slaughtered animals ever ... I see them as death objects’ (D. Hirst, quoted in S. Morgan, ‘An Interview with Damien Hirst’, in No Sense of Absolute Corruption, exh. cat. Gagosian Gallery, New York 1996, p. 18). His interest in smoking is similarly symbolic. Like candles in a memento mori still life, cigarettes are markers of the passage of time, their burning down analogous to the slow extinguishing of a human lifespan. Hirst, however, finds a paradoxical splendour in the agency of smoking. ‘I went to some posh person’s house and they had a tiny little fucking ashtray, it was about two inches by one inch’, he said in 1995. ‘And they had a beautiful house. It’s like they were trying to reduce the horror to such a point. You could only fit about three cigarette butts in it, then they’d empty it … The whole thing in life is you don’t know when you’re going to die. It makes everything not make sense, there’s this unknown factor. Whereas if you suddenly go, “OK, I choose to die now”, you take the matter into your own hands. So smoking is the perfect way to commit suicide without actually dying’ (D. Hirst, quoted in A. Graham-Dixon, ‘In the Picture: Horror at Home, by Damien Hirst’, The Sunday Telegraph, 31 December 2000). The present work seems to visualise this contradiction, and in its monumental scale becomes a riveting piece of theatre. Rather than shrinking from mortality, Hirst invites the viewer to confront it as part of life: his ashtray is an arena large enough to dive into, like a bullring or colosseum, with death a stubbed-out offering at its centre.