It's fluffy, it's pickled in formaldehyde, and it's no longer got an armed guard. After much goatee-scratching, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has removed the gun-toting security detail it employed to keep vandals from attacking Damien Hirst's installation "Away From the Flock" (pictured at the exhibition).
Yesterday, the tastefully-arranged sheep (a Shropshire, if I'm not very much mistaken) was being looked after by three watchful attendants. But they weren't carrying pistols and batons like the team of guards who caused a minor outrage when the exhibit was originally unveiled last month.
Back then, visitors complained of feeling unwelcome to linger over the installation because of the presence of firearms. It was a strange complaint, given the presence of trigger-happy LAPD officers on almost every Angelean street corner, but one that created an international outcry all the same.
The museum, for its part, was anxious to prevent a repeat of an incident which occurred in 1994, when artist Mark Bridger poured black ink into the animal's tank at the Serpentine Gallery in London, re-labelling it: "black sheep."
Anyway, the hoo-hah is now finally over. LACMA – as the gallery is called – has admitted defeat, and those Colt 45s have disappeared from its enormous premises, which stretch for almost half a mile along Wilshire Boulevard.
As for Hirst's work, it now seems strangely out of place. The USA was built on beef-burgers, cowboys and McDonalds – so people don't really know what to make of a sheep. Ditto his medicine cabinets, in a country where ambulance men swipe your credit card before carting you off to hospital.
Even LACMA's amazing Hirst butterfly painting, of three gothic stained-glass windows, carries none of its usual brooding menace, when looked at through the prism of this devotedly Christian society.
Damien Hirst is still a creative genius, of course. But in California that somehow doesn't prevent him feeling as if he's just another Brit abroad.
(Photo: REUTERS/Fred Prouser)
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Posted by: Skinassume | Sunday, 06 December 2009 at 09:25 AM