The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living

Judged on the configuration. Very little can be removed. Take away the liquid and it is a carcass; take away the glass and it is a specimen on a slab, with no barrier between the living and the dead and no display; take away the title and the work loses its proposition and becomes a natural-history exhibit. The scale is compelled: the shark has to be large enough to threaten the viewer’s body, and the tank long enough to let it seem to swim. What gives is substitution, not removal. The three bays are a design choice the work could do without, and the animal itself has been substituted once, by the artist, who held that the work continued. A work that survives the replacement of its central element has shown that the element was required as a kind, not as itself. Necessity is high, and of a narrow kind.

Score: 8.6 / 10

What can be stated: the living cannot conceive of their own death even when it is set before them at full scale; the predator that could kill you is made safe by glass and fluid, and the safety is the disclosure. The work tests its title on the viewer: you stand at the open jaw, and the death in front of you remains a spectacle. A second proposition, unintended and now part of the object: the work could not itself be kept from dying and had to be replaced, which says something true about preserving the dead; but it happened rather than being made, and adds a little, not a full proposition. These hold, but they are thin. The first is stated by the title more than discovered by the object, and most of what the encounter gives is a state, a start of fear and then a cooled fascination. A state ranks below a meaning.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The elevation is terror, and it is real. Approached from the front, the open jaw and the rows of teeth come at the viewer at head height, the body behind them longer than a person and seemingly in motion, the light bluish-green in the fluid. For a moment the glass is forgotten, and that moment is high. What limits the axis is frequency. The work rises once, at first sight from the front. Seen from the side it becomes a long specimen in a frame; on return the terror is known and does not recur at the same pitch; and the decay of the first shark, visible for years, damaged even the first moment for those who saw it. A single summit in an otherwise cool object: high, but held below works that rise again and again.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The archetype is present in the thing itself rather than alluded to: the sea monster, the devourer, Leviathan, the death with teeth. It is not a picture of a shark; it is a shark, and the archetype comes with the body. The vitrine adds a second pattern, the reliquary and the coffin with a window, the dead kept for veneration; and a third, the museum’s cabinet of specimens, which turns the monster into knowledge. These are built into the configuration. What holds the axis below the gate: the myth is not elaborated beyond the presence of the animal; nothing in the arrangement makes the monster’s story load-bearing; and much of its archetypal charge in 1991 came from the cinema, from the shark film of 1975, rather than from anything the work constructs. Built in the body and the box, evoked everywhere else.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The inheritance: Duchamp’s readymade; Koons’s basketballs floating in tanks, of 1985; the minimal box and the vitrines of Judd and of Beuys; living and dead animals in the art of the 1960s and 1970s, Kounellis’s horses and Beuys’s hare; Bacon’s figures in glass cages, which Hirst named as a source; and the natural-history museum. The departure: the whole real animal, large, predatory and dead, preserved and posed as alive, set in the white box of sculpture at the scale of a monument, under a title of philosophical pretension. The stake: a young artist’s career, staged with a collector’s money; public mockery in the press; and the risk, which came true, that the material would fail. Held at the bar and not above it because the moves were prepared by Koons and by Hirst’s own work of 1990, and because the funding lessened the cost.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Would another form change what the work knows? Largely. The knowledge is that death in front of you is still not your death, and it depends on the real body: a model shark, a photograph or a painting would be an image of a threat, and the viewer’s body would not register it. The glass is the second term: it shows everything and allows no contact, so that the separation the title names is built as a wall. The fluid makes the dead body seem to swim, so that the work is at once alive in pose and dead in fact, its whole proposition made physical. The frieze proportion makes the body something to walk along. Held below the top because the replacement showed that the form is the concept and the kind, not this body, and because the three bays add little that the knowledge needs.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Evidence over promise: 35 years, a span too short for the evidence the axis prefers. The return has produced a real literature, but most of it is about the work’s life rather than its object: whether it is art; the price; the collector; the decay, the replacement, and what a conceptual work owes its material; the shark as the emblem of a decade and a market. These are genuine questions, and the replacement opened a new one, about identity and authenticity, that keeps yielding. On return to the object itself, less: the encounter is front-loaded, the meaning is stated in the title, and a second or a tenth visit finds little in the tank that the first did not. Formal depth is limited by the work’s simplicity, which is its strength and its ceiling.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The field is its own region and decade: British art of the 1990s, and the international art of spectacle that followed. The intrinsic force: it made the real body, the large dead animal, a sculptural material, and made spectacle and the market part of a work’s meaning; after it the vitrine and the specimen became a common grammar. The discount: the moves were prepared by Koons and by the readymade, so the reorganisation is narrower than its fame. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the emblem of the Young British Artists, the centre of Sensation at the Royal Academy in 1997, the image by which a generation of art was named, and a turning point in what contemporary art could be worth. Its reach in the art that came after is diffuse rather than specific; in its region and decade, nothing redirected the field more visibly.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Span: 35 years as a work, 20 for the present animal. Form: whole and legible as conceived; the concept, pose, scale and title stand. Presence: wide and continuous, lent and shown in London, New York and elsewhere; fame is presence, not proof, and is given little weight. Fabric: the first animal decayed through a failure of the first making and was replaced, and the present shark is a different body. The work’s survival now depends on a regime of replacement and maintenance, with no proof yet that fluid and specimen will last. Since the animal is the work’s content and not its support, its loss takes more than a loss of fabric usually does, and the charge is taken here, and on no other axis. The clock is not reset to 2006: what was made in 1991 still stands, in another body.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Judged as command of the medium as it stands: preservation, fabrication and placement, made largely by others under the artist’s direction, which is not charged. Load-bearing where achieved: the pose, mouth open and body angled so that the jaw meets the approach from the front; the suspension, so that the animal seems to swim rather than float; the clarity of the fluid and the light through it; the proportion of tank to body, close enough to confine and long enough to let it move. The engineering of a vitrine that holds that volume of fluid behind glass is precise. What holds the axis: the range of decisions is narrow, and many of them are a taxidermist’s and a fabricator’s; and the failure of the first making, though weighed on survival, shows that command of the material was not complete in 1991. Sound command of a small set of means.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the animal, organic, dead and once wild, and the steel frame, geometric, manufactured and clean. They obey one law, the law of display: everything is presented, lit, separated and held still for inspection, and the shark is made to obey the box’s order as completely as the glass does. The title obeys it too, the language of a laboratory report applied to a mind. That coherence is complete. But the range it governs is narrow: one animal, one box, one liquid, one sentence. Narrowness is not coherence, and the width of what a law governs counts with its consistency. The one clash, the pose of life against the fact of death, is meant, and it is the work, not a breach of its law. Coherent and narrow.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The orders held: death, faced directly; the natural order, in the predator from the open sea; consciousness, named in the title and made the site of the work, since the work happens in the viewer’s mind; science, in the specimen and the cabinet; and, as context more than content, the market and the institution, which the work’s life has drawn in. The box holds them together, integrating nature, science and display. What holds the axis lowest: there is no human figure, no family, no labour, no state and no history, and the sacred enters only by the analogy of the reliquary. A single object with a single proposition cannot encompass much. The low mark describes the form.

Score: 6.6 / 10