Controversial visual artist, Damien Hirst has done it again. With his latest installation in Lever House in New York and another virgin..er I mean...version standing tall at the entrance of the garden at Chatsworth for the 'Beyond Limits' exhibition, 'The Virgin Mother' is turning out to be one of Hirst's most confronting and some would even say 'grotesque' visions of pregnancy. Inspired by Degas' 'Little Dancer', the exposure of bones, muscle tissue and a fully grown fetus captured inside a very pregnant body, leaves me with mixed reactions.I hesitate to call this a pregnant 'woman' because the exposure of this body, stripped of its skin and visualised is not a 'woman'. This 'woman' is completely disembodied strangely reminiscent of the ways in which reproductive technology has opened up the once hidden recesses of a woman's uterus for biomedicine. Whereas pregnancy was only evident through quickening and known only to the woman herself, today we live in a world that is endlessly visualisable. Fetuses can be 'seen' only a few weeks into a pregnancy and treated surgically inside the womb before they are even born. This sculpture is confronting to say the least and a significant challenge to the fantasy world of celebrity pregnancy where the pregnant body is treated as a sexual object. Here, Hirst strongly connects with early anatomical visions of the pregnant body, most of which represented only a torso and exposed uterus, with no reference to the woman herself.
Curious title. Quite obviously there are religious undertones here. Perhaps a reference to increasing technologising/bioengineering of 'life'. Is IVF is the new immaculate conception?
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