Still Life, Melissa Milgrom [pdf e book reader .TXT] 📗

that I'm working on. And two cow heads that have to be cast as well." She invited me to watch her work. She sent me a link to help me find a cheap flight.

She was 372^ hours into the cow when I showed up in Guilt Cross. It was the week before Christmas. Half-finished Hirst projects lay everywhere: resin blood puddles, a fish skeleton in a vise, and two cow heads in the boiler room. But the first thing I saw when I stepped inside the workshop was a seven-foot-long black-and-white Holstein suspended from an I-beam. Its head drooped down as if it had been hanged. Its tongue stuck out comically from lips that were soft and black and fringed with stray whiskers. The cow looked dead—freshly dead—which it was supposed to be. Its glossy legs were artificially bent at the knees as if it were genuflecting or begging for mercy. Its chest cavity was split open. You could see its guts, its blood-red rib cage, its glistening milky yellow fat. It was horrific. It was beautiful. It was a crucified cow.

"How the hell did you make this?" I asked, unable to move for several seconds as I gazed at the most stunning, and the most terrifying, piece of art I have ever seen. It was the most alive dead replica imaginable, which of course sounds silly.

"You can see inside the cow—all the ribs and everything. That's all fake," she said. "You want to believe it's a cow in there and not just a black hollow cavity." Her tone was admonishing, as if I should know what the fake innards of a fake dead cow were supposed to look like. She lit a roll-up and thoughtfully inhaled. I stared transfixed.

Mayer had no idea what the client intended to do with the cow once it was finished, and I didn't pry, because I found it far more disturbing here in Mayer's studio than it would ever be anywhere else, especially a gallery or a museum where glass panes might separate it from me. Glass panes are barriers, which say in effect, "This is staged." Glass panes anchor a piece (and us) to the museum, a cultural authority, legitimizing it. Moreover, the glass separates us from death; it's a distancing element, providing safety, comfort, and, perhaps more important, a sense that someone is in charge of this death, someone with a respectable title that is not "taxidermist," such as "conservator" or "curator" or "philanthropist" or "scientist." But in here, in Mayer's workhouse studio, in this dark, wintry, isolated Norfolk farm country, the cow was eerie and surreal. There was no glass partition separating me from it, and I shivered with excitement and fear.

It was her fifth erosion-molded cow and her best. It is incredibly difficult to erosion mold a cow. Every scrap of anatomy must be preplanned. If she miscalculates, say, the catalyst times for the resin, the cow might cure improperly, and the fur is irreplaceable. The attention to detail is staggering. You can look up its nostrils and see bumps and hair. You can peer into its mouth at its pink-and-gray-ribbed pallet. Its big brown eyes are bloodshot near the irises; its fur-fringed ears are soft and translucent; its teats and asshole are embarrassingly convincing. All of that has to be worked out before the cow is slaughtered.

"Everything is fake except the hair, obviously. It's essentially a fake cow with real hair," Mayer explained.

The hooves?

"The hooves were cast with everything else. There's pink inside so you have that glow and depth and it looks like a living thing rather than a lump of solidness."

The teeth?

"I just cast the teeth in when I cast the whole cow. You can see the negative in the mold in the boiler room."

The eyes?

"They need to look fresh like it just died. I like them a little more glazed over."

Mayer still had to reattach the cow's head, fine-tune its face, and hide the seams. She also had to make fake intestines, because the work order called for guts to spill out of its body. Color photocopies of purple and yellow cow intestines lay all over the studio; she'd use them as a guide—like a high-tech paint-by-number—only instead of paint, Mayer would use a mixture of resin and flock (wool fibers that give it texture). She compared the process to painting on glass.

For this job, however, color photocopies alone wouldn't do. Mayer would need fresh reference, so she had the slaughterhouse open up a cow and photograph its hot intestines spilling out onto its hooves. The intestines were then frozen and delivered to her studio. Now she booted up her laptop and clicked on a file name, calling up the slit-open cow spilling guts. Then she clicked on another file (I'll spare you). She took a drag on her cigarette; the smell of smoke kept me from throwing up.

"Obviously, we didn't want it sitting on its ass, because that would look totally stupid!" she said with a snarl, clicking JPEG file after JPEG file. No, it was to be bent at the knees. But cows' knees don't bend ("Obviously!") unless you cut the tendons. With typical Mayer relish, she showed me where she cut them. "I just put a scalpel ... I just cut them from the insides just like a tiny old nick." The tongue had already been sticking out, but "I persuaded it a bit more."

Here's how Mayer cast the cow's body. Once the frozen cow was posed and coated in silicone inside and out (she intubated it and poured rubber down its throat), she bolted a thermoplastic support jacket with ribs over the outside of the body to hold the cow in place while the flesh rotted and the rubber cured. Once it had uniformly decomposed, Mayer pried off the jacket, peeled off the silicone, and implanted all the precast anatomy.

"You can do things most women never would," I said.

"I can do things most men can't do!" she said with a loud