Understanding Two Modern Sculptures

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that both sculptures share a formal similarity in that both deal with representing visual quantities that are both linear and quantized and deal with similar themes and aesthetic values. The author describes Judd's sculpture as an unbroken line with a segmented one below it, and Hirst's piece represents a segmented line of glass cases containing sections of the corpses of two cows. The paper elucidates that both pieces offer a meditation on human alienation and seem to eschew traditional definitions of aesthetic standards in their composition.

From the Paper:

"The pun in accomplishing this work occurs because the sense of disintegration of meaning that Kristeva describes above occurs as we are viewing a literally segmented self. Indeed, part of the difficulty as an observer is to ascertain or imagine what each cow would have looked like whole and further more to discover which part belongs to which cow. But our minds are incapable of doing so because we are also distracted by the starkness of the cows' viscera, which ugliness is extremely difficult for us to process. In this way, our attempt, in some way, to reconstruct their bodies the thing that determined their existence as distinct individuals when they were alive is thwarted by our disgust at seeing those things the bodies contain as well. In this fashion, we are forced to confront the horrible truth of our own fractured and problematic self-hood by experiencing the literally fragmented bodies of the cows."

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