Damien Hirst's, This Little Piggy Went to Market, This Little Piggy Stayed at Home, A Contemporary Vanitas Experienced

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Damien Hirst’s, This Little Piggy Went to Market, This Little PiggyStayed at Home, A Contemporary Vanitas Experienced. By Lewis Kerr

This little piggy went to market,

This little piggy stayed at home,

This little piggy had roast beef,

This little piggy had none,

And this little piggy cried, Wee-wee-wee-wee –wee

All the way home.

Damien Hirst’s, This Little Piggy Went to Market, This Little

Piggy Stayed At Home, (Fig. 1) is a contemporary Vanitas sculpture.

It was part of a postmodern installation called, No Sense of Absolute

Corruption. “The Vanitas concept stands for the vanity of humankind

and the brevity of life which is expressed in Vanitas painting by

juxtaposing a symbol of life with one for death…The image of life

seems ever more precious when it is shown to be fleeting.”1 Damien

Hirst expresses the Vanitas concept in his sculpture by displaying

separately, in two tanks, a slaughtered pig suspended in greenish-blue

formaldehyde. The viewer sees one half of the pig with its internal

organs exposed frontally to the viewer. The movement of the tanks is 1 Ora Lerman, “Contemporary Vanitas,” Arts Magazine, March 1988, 60.

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accompanied by the inhuman sound or screech of the tanks being dragged

back and forth on the mechanized track. The disturbing, grating noise

of the tanks moving back and forth on the track is an audible metaphor

for the pain experienced by the animal when it was slaughtered.

The theme of the sculpture is the brevity of life or mortality.

In the kinetic sculpture the viewer experiences the illusion of the

pig being repeatedly slaughtered. The tank containing the half of the

pig, as it appears alive, moves forward to reveal the other half of

the pig cadaver with its entrails on view.

Hirst confirmed that the sculpture, This Little Piggy Went to

Market, This Little Piggy Stayed at Home, is a Vanitas. When being

interviewed about the sculpture he stated that, “the big glass and

steel case came from a fear of everything being so fragile and [that

he] wanted to make a sculpture where the fragility exists in its own

space…"2

The shocking aspect of the title, This Little Piggy went to

Market, This Little Piggy Stayed at Home” is its reference to the

children’s nursery rhyme. The fragility of life is enforced by the

title of the nursery rhyme sung by children. Children have a more

fragile physical existence and a less fully developed sense of

2 Gordon Burn, “Hirst World,” The Guardian (London) 31 August 1996, PT10.

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mortality than do adults. Originally, Hirst titled the work Ignorance

Explored, Explained and Exploded”3. The original title suggests the

artist’s view of contemporary man’s incomprehension of physical death.

In Hirst’s contemporary Vanitas sculpture, he is also expressing

the Surrealist concept of the reality of the object. “Surrealists

believed an entity is more than its immediate data…it is the

conviction that one will discover more of the reality concealed within

the entity than in the immediate data surrounding it.”4 Hirst

confirmed the idea of reality being concealed on the inside in This

Little Piggy Went to Market, This Little Piggy Stayed at Home. He

stated that when he cuts an animal in half, “…you can see what’s on

the inside and outside simultaneously, it’s beautiful. The only

problem is that it’s dead.”5

The idea of dead animals and their rotting flesh being symbols of

human mortality has been presented in Vanitas paintings since the

Baroque period. A classic example of Dutch Baroque vanitas is

Rembrandt’s painting, Slaughtered Ox, 1655 (Fig.2)

The massive carcass of the butchered animal emerges from the dimly lit shop to confront the viewer with questions about hisown mortality…the dead animal is an affirmation of the

3 Bonami, 112.4 Lerman, 60.5 Damien Hirst No Sense of Absolute Corruption, (New York: Raymond Foze [1996]), 7.

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sacramental nature of all life and is regarded as such by the dwarfed woman looking through the door in back of the shop.6

Rembrandt’s depiction of a slaughtered ox on a rack in the tomb-like dimness of a butcher’s shop

appears almost cruciform. It suggests the theme of Christ’s blood shed for eternal life.

Like Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox, Hirst’s butchered pig suggests

the Vanitas theme of mortality. However, it does not suggest the

Christian theme of eternal life, as does Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox.

Hirst’s sculpture is focused on the dual concept of man’s ignorance of

his own mortality and the idea of spiritual death in contemporary

life.

The artist confirmed the idea of the dual concepts of death

represented in the sculpture. When Hirst was interviewed about the

installation show, No Sense of Absolute Corruption in which the

sculpture, This Little Piggy… was included, he stated: “we’ve got an

inbuilt desire to avoid death in a physical way, but how many people

do you see wandering around who have a big problem with death? I’m

dead end of story.”7 The spiritual death the artist referred to is the

alienation man experiences in contemporary life when engaging in “pig-

like” behaviors, (e.g. the lust and over consumption emphasized in

6 Bruce Cole and Adelheid Gealt, Art of the Western World from Ancient Greece to Postmodernism (New York: Summit Books, 1989) 191.7 Michael Kimmelman, “Art Review, Cows, Pigs, Cigarettes, All Dead,: The New York Times, 10 May 1996, pc, 21.

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contemporary consumer cultures). Hirst’s slaughtered pig becomes a

symbol of spiritual death, the loss of soul or spirit, and the absence

of any deeply felt meaning many people experience in the contemporary,

consumerist culture of a capitalistic society. The entrails of

Hirst’s pig are displayed, but the spirit or soul of the animal, as

implied in Rembrandt’s painting, is not implied in Hirst’s sculpture.

Hirst’s slaughtered pig in his sculpture, This Little Piggy Went

to Market, This Little Stayed at Home, has the Vanitas theme of

mortality. The sculpture also focuses on the spiritual death

experienced by mortals in our contemporary culture. To understand the

additional thematic significance of the slaughtered pig in Hirst’s

vanitas sculpture, one must look to the tradition symbolic meaning of

a pig in art. In the Middle Ages, the pig was a “…symbol of greed and

lust…” an attribute of “…lust personified.”8

The spiritual death man experienced by gratifying his greed and

lust was depicted in art with pigs before Hirst by the German

Renaissance artist, Albrecht Durer. In Durer’s engraving, The

Prodigal Son (Fig. 3), the son metaphorically became a pig. He ends

up eating cornhusks with pigs in a pigsty. The son’s “greed and

8 James Hall, Dictionary of subjects and Symbols in Art, (New York: Harper andRow, 1974) 247.

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lust”, attributes of a pig, leads him to “riotous living”.9 In the

Biblical morality tale, the prodigal son squandered his inheritance

and during a famine had to resort to living with pigs in the squalor

and stench of a pigsty. Durer depicts him in the sty, praying for

deliverance from the spiritual death.

In contemporary consumer cultures, man exhibits the qualities

symbolic of pigs’ lust and greed by his mass consumption of consumer

goods. Consumer cultures have a great amount of “…commodity

production, leading to societies full of goods and services…This leads

to a lust for consuming products-and conspicuously displaying them –as

a means of demonstrating that one is a success…”10

Hirst, while being interviewed about the show No Sense of

Absolute Corruption, in which the Vanitas sculpture This Little Piggy…

was included stated that he wanted to explore different kinds of

corruption. Mainly, he wanted to explore “…The absolute corruption of

life which is death.”11 And, the ideas of physical and moral corruption

in life are presented in all the sculptures in the installation show.

9 The Holy Bible, (New York: Cambridge University Press) 89.10 Arthur Asa Berger, Ads, Fads & Consumer Culture Second Edition, (New York:Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.) 27.11 Damien Hirst No sense of Absolute Corruption, (New York: Raymond Foze [1996]), 1.

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He further noted that “advertising is corruption, so there is the big

billboard sculpture. Everything is rotting, even sculptures.”12

Arthur Berger confirmed Hirst’s view on the corrupt influences of

advertising in capitalistic societies. In his book on consumer

culture Berger wrote:

Advertising since it is paid for by private entities generally does not have a social investment message to it but instead focuses onindividuals pursuing their private passions [lusts].

‘The hell with everyone else’ is the subtext of many of these messages. And as American society becomes more and more split into classes one that is increasingly wealthy and one that is increasingly poor the social tensions become stronger… [he states]…that advertisingoften distracts us from paying attention to the need for social investments, from a concern for the public sphere and thus by its verynature tends to be politically conservative.13

Berger views capitalistic leaders (political conservatives) as heads

of an economic system that keep the power structure in place. The

political leaders keep the corporate power structure functioning,

leading to mass production and mass consumption. The corporations

persuade people, through advertising, to be mass consumers. Through

manipulative advertising, leading to mass consumption, corporations

make huge profits, maintain their market share of sales, and keep the

status quo in place.

12 Damien Hirst No Sense of Absolute Corruption, (New York: Raymond Foze [1996]), 27.13 Berger, 32.

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In capitalist consumer societies, the ruling conservative

political leaders could be viewed as “capitalist pigs.” The Danish

artist, Bjorn Norgaard, portrayed conservative political personalities

in his work Pigs on Pedestals (Fig. 4). Each of the identical pig

heads is labeled with the name of a different political leader. The

artist represents the leaders as identical pig busts because they have

the same capitalistic ideology.14 The wealthy consumer through his

prodigality becomes spiritually dead. Metaphorically, man becomes

like a pig, through his lustful overconsumption. As Albrecht Durer

stated in the Renaissance, “pigs is pigs”.15 And in artistic

depictions, pigs symbolize greed, lust, and gluttony.

Thus, the slaughtered pig in the sculpture, This Little Piggy Wet

to Market, this Little Piggy Stayed at Home, included in the

installation show No Sense of Absolute Corruption becomes a Vanitas

about man’s mortality and also, a metaphor for man’s spiritual death

through his lust and over consumption. The artist Damien Hirst

communicates this dual concept of physical and spiritual death by

effectively using the visual language of postmodernism. In some way,

he mimics the language of modern art. The glass-side tanks of Hirst’s

This Little Piggy… remind one of the minimal works of Donald Judd 14 Marcia Muelder Eaton, Art and Nonart (Toronto: Associated University presses, 1983) 50.15 Colin Eisle, Durer’s Animals (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991) 187.

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(Fig. 5). Hirst fully appropriates the minimalist boxes by filling

them with a pig cadaver.

On critic labeled Hirst’s Judd-like boxes dumb boxes, and stated:

His dumb boxes with their silent aura simultaneously fortress and cage insulated against the life givingair are obvious metaphors for individual and corporeal corruptibility-for the nearness and inevitability of personal death, which is his overriding obsession.16

However, at time the minimalist boxes seem to contrast with the pig

cadaver content of, This Little Piggy…. The human viewer enters the

space of the sculpture and becomes “…an ever changing part of the

composition…”17 The viewer becomes part of the work of art. Hirst, in

being interviewed about the sculpture, said he liked “…the stupid idea

of the pig moving like a bacon slicer which is logical but twisted.”18

In the sense of the viewer becoming part of the sculpture, Hirst’s

statement reinforces the Vanitas theme of the sculpture and the idea

of man’s spiritual death in contemporary life. The viewer---man---

sees the pig, symbolizing his lust, being slaughtered for meat. In

consuming the pork (or pig), man becomes more pig-like. And, in

effect the consumer (the viewer becomes the consumed.

In conclusion, Damien Hirst’s contemporary Vanitas sculpture This

Little Piggy Went to Market, This Little Piggy Stayed at Home, 16 Kimmelman, pc21.17 Gordon Burn, PT10.18 Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan, the Sculptor’s Eye Looking at ContemporaryAmerican Art (New York: Delacorte Press, 1993) 84.

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represents mortality and metaphorically seems to represent the

spiritual death experienced by man in contemporary society. As

Norgaard’s pig head in his work Pigs on Pedestals symbolizes

capitalist political and corporate leaders in contemporary consumer

cultures, Damien Hirst’s pig in his work, This Little Piggy symbolizes

man’s prodigality. The soulless encased slaughtered pig seems to

represent the spiritual death some individuals experience in

contemporary consumer cultures.

In Rembrandt’s Vanitas painting, Slaughtered Ox, the woman

portrayed looking through a doorway at the slaughtered animal in its

tomb-like enclosure, experiences an animal’s death and seems to be

reminded of her own mortality. The viewer of Hirst’s Vanitas

sculpture, This Little Piggy Went to Market, This Little Piggy Stayed

at Home experiences the illusion of the physical death of a pig and is

perhaps reminded of his own mortality. The rhyme, “This Little Piggy

Went to Market, This Little Piggy Stayed at Home”, becomes an ironic

lament for contemporary man’s fate.

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Fig. 1 Damien Hirst This Little Piggy Went to Market, This Little Piggy Stayed at Home 1996.

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Fig, 2 Rembrandt, The Slaughtered Ox , 1655.

Fig. 3 Albrecht Durer, The Prodigal Son Amid the Swine, 1471.

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Fig. 4 Bjorn Norgaard, Pigs on Pedestals , 1977.

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Fig. 5 Donald Judd, “Aluminum Box”, 1969.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure

1. This Little Piggy Went to Market, This Little Piggy Stayed at Home, 1996, www.damienhisrst.com/this-little-piggy-went -to .

2. Rembrandt, Slaughtered Ox, 1655, www.wag:hu/htmlm/r/rembrandt.41mis/09misc.html

3. Durer, The Prodigal Son Among Pigs, 1471, www.artbible.info/art/large/513.html.

4. Judd, Aluminum Box, 1969, arttattler:com/archivedonaldjudd.html

5. Norgaard, Pigs on Pedestals, 1977, www.phart.com/bjorn-norgaard.

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Works Cited

Bonami, Franceso. “Damien Hirst, The exploded View of the Artist.” Flash Art, Summer, 1996,

112.

Burn, Gordon. “Hirst World.” The Guardian, 31 August 1996, PT10.

Cole, Bruce, and Adelheid Gealt, Art of the Western World. New York: Summit Books, 1989.

Damien Hirst Pictures from the Saatchi Gallery. London: Booth Clibborn Editions [2001].

Damien Hirst No Sense of Absolute Corruption. New York: Raymond Foz [1996].

Gaggi, Silvi. Modern Postmodern A Study in Twentieth CenturyArts and Ideas.

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.

Greenberg, Jan and Sandra Jordan. The Sculptor’s Eye, Looking at Contemporary Art.

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New York: Delacorte Press, 1993.

Hall, James. Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art. NewYork: Harper & Row, 1974.

Kimmelman, Michael. “Cows, Pigs, Cigarettes, All Dead,” TheNew York Times,

10 May 1996, pc21.

Leerman, Ora. “Contemporary Vanitas, Arts Magazine, March, 1988, 60.

The Holy Bible. New York: Cambridge University Press.