Hurst's A Thousand Years

The piece consists of a large glass-sided, sectioned box containing a rotting cow's head, flies, maggots, sugar water and a fly ‘zapper’.  It is a life-cycle enactment that has continued to function in this enclosed environment since 1990 when it was made. According to Jerry Saltz (1995) writing in Art in America: ‘Given that the average life span of a fly is three to four weeks, there have been upwards of 60 generations of flies within the piece since 1990’ In the image below, the cow's head is 'new' but now all the skin and ears have been stripped off and it is pink and softer in shape.

www.artinamericamagazine.com/newsfeatures/magazine/more-life-the-work-of-damien-hirst

 In an interview with Tate director, Nicholas Serota, Hurst said that this was the most exciting piece he felt he had ever made. (Searle, 2012) In the same Guardian review, Searle describes the piece as ‘Clean and dirty, full of life and death, formally shocking and rich, it has an air of maturity and finality’http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/apr/02/damien-hirst-tate-review

These contradictions and binary opposites are what I am trying to incorporate in my installation.

I have been considering adding maggots to my curiosity cabinet to allow them to feed on sugar sprinkled onto a photographic kaleidoscope of rotten meat, but that all seems a bit  too obvious and clichéd having realised that Hurst’s A Thousand Years was created almost 24 years ago!!

 I know that the use of creative plagiarism is O.K in the art world and that every artist has been inspired by previous work, but Hurst is so well known and 24 years is almost too recent, but I am not sure if I can move forward with this idea. I was going to use maggots, flies and possible spiders and other insects like cockroaches  not to represent the life/ death cycle as in A Thousand Years but to comment on the inevitability of decay and chaos not matter what we do to control and forestall it. But I do not want people to look at my piece and say ‘Oh yes, Damian Hurst’...