dean in a white cube

[An extract from the novel Grand Prix, 2003]

The next stage will be learning how to reduce consciousness to a state of non-feeling without the help of stimulants. Still a long way to go before we become sophisticated enough to pull that one off. However, on the day Dean met Aziza, he felt as though he might have got close to an understanding of what it might be like. He’d been inspired by a visit to the Damien Hirst exhibition at the White Cube, in the shadow of the giant charity doll in Hoxton Square.

The exhibition was the latest offering from the enfant terrible of what used to be called Brit Art. Hirst became famous in the late twentieth century for chopping cows in half and painting spots on boats. His latest exhibition was more of the same. Trademark cows cut in half. Plenty of trademark gore. A few trademark spots. And in the upstairs gallery, four trademark cows’ heads floating in formaldehyde, the modern aspic. Each head had its own glass cabinet and these cabinets were then arranged in a crucifix formation, lending gratuitous religious undertones to the oeuvre. The four cows’ heads, flesh flapping in fluid, had been impaled with a dazzling array of sharp instruments: carving knives, cleavers, scissors, hatpins and sheer shards of broken glass.

Dean dwelt on the exhibition’s macabre qualities as he described it to me. His tone was reverential. I recalled the meat cleaver he’d been wielding at the Spitz gig. I guessed I must have visited the exhibition around the same time as Dean. It hadn’t impressed me all that much: it seemed exactly what you’d expect from a quack doctor who’d resorted to recycling his old tricks.

Whereas, for Dean, the exhibition had been an epiphany. He stood in the upstairs room, captivated by the four cabinets. Fascinated, he squatted and stared at the array of weapons inserted into the cows’ heads. The cabinets were knee-high, and he got right down to their level, lying on the floor and gazing into the cows’ dead eyes. What he saw, he told me, was the most accurate possible rendition of life. We’re all of us dumb animals having knives stabbed into our faces by a vengeful motherfucker artist in the name of aesthetics, only none of us realise it. When I told him that the cows were dead, that they couldn’t feel anything, he looked at me as though I’d missed the point. He told me that just because you were lucky enough to be dead doesn’t mean your memories die with you. You didn’t escape from your senses that easily. The secret was discovering how to accommodate the pain. These cows endured, day in, day out. They were the victim of a horrendous crime, but they didn’t let it get to them. That was something, he told me. Something valuable to learn from.