Damien Hirst’s latest run-in with animal rights groups has seen the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg dismantle his installation A Hundred Years (1990) after complaints from PETA were filed against the artist and the German museum.
The work consists of a bisected glass display case, within which flies hatch on one side, are drawn across the space to an artificial light that electrocutes the flies upon contact. ‘A life cycle in a box’, in the artist’s words. Originally displayed alongside his One Thousand Years in London in 1990, where a severed cow’s head sits in the display case below the ‘fly-zapper’.
In a statement shared by Spiegel, a representative for PETA said that ‘killing animals has nothing to do with art, it just shows the arrogance of people who literally will stop at nothing for their own interests’. Germany’s Animal Welfare Act states that no one may hurt or harm an animal without a ‘rational reason’.
‘We share the basic idea of the animal welfare organization that animals are not there to entertain us or exploit them,’ the museum’s managing director Otmar Böhmer said in a statement. The museum has been attempting to contact the artist and his representatives to clarify whether the installation can be presented with artificial flies instead, or otherwise never be exhibited again in Germany.
The Kunstmuseum’s director, Andreas Beitin was a little more terse: ‘We didn’t think flies were covered by the Animal Welfare Act’.
